The Economist:

PARISIANS are in a tizz about capitalism. New Yorkers get stressed about sex. In Seoul and San Antonio, Texas, 11,000km apart, citizens fret about the relationship between humans and apes. What goes into school textbooks–and, even more, what is left out–spurs concern and controversy all over the world.
And so it should. Few, if any, instruments shape national culture more powerfully than the materials used in schools. Textbooks are not only among the first books most people encounter; in many places they are, along with religious texts, almost the only books they encounter. A study in South Africa showed that fewer than half of pupils had access to more than ten books at home. In 2010 a study by Egypt’s government found that, apart from school textbooks, 88% of Egyptian households read no books.

Young Invicibles:

Young Invincibles and NERA Economic Consulting released a report today entitled “Lost Without a Map: A Survey About Student Experiences Navigating the Financial Aid Process” detailing the results from a survey of nearly 13,000 college students and recent graduates with high levels of student debt. Strikingly, over 40% of respondents with federal student loans reported that they had not received federally mandated student loan counseling. The results suggest that students across the country are not receiving adequate information about the financial aid process – particularly students who need it most.
“This survey sheds light on a key failing of our federal financial aid system. Too many students are confused by the FAFSA, lack adequate counseling, and do not understand basic student loan terms,” said Rory O’Sullivan, Policy Director at Young Invincibles and co-author of the report. “Clearly colleges are not doing enough to provide meaningful student loan counseling, as required by law. Our survey also shows broad student support for the Department of Education’s recent initiative to promote a standardized financial aid letter. Students badly need this information and see their schools as trusted sources.”

The Economist:

HEALTH-CARE expenditure in America is growing at a disturbing rate: in 1960 it was just over 5% of GDP, in 2011 almost 18%. By 2105 the number could reach 60%, according to William Baumol of New York University’s Stern School of Business. Incredible? It is simply the result of extrapolating the impact of a phenomenon Mr Baumol has become famous for identifying: “cost disease”. His new book* gives a nuanced diagnosis, offerings both a vision of a high-cost future and a large dose of optimism. The cost disease may be incurable, but it is also survivable–if treated correctly.
To understand the cost disease, start with a simple observation: whatever the economy’s average rate of productivity growth, some industries outpace others. Take car manufacturing. In 1913 Ford introduced assembly lines to move cars between workstations. This allowed workers, and their tools, to stay in one place, which cut the time to build a Model T car from 12 hours to less than two. As output per worker grows in such “progressive” sectors, firms can afford to increase wages.
In some sectors of the economy, however, such productivity gains are much harder to come by–if not impossible. Performing a Mozart quartet takes just as long in 2012 as it did in the late 18th century. Mr Baumol calls industries in which productivity growth is low or even non-existent “stagnant”.

David Hogberg:

President Obama has more than doubled funding for Pell Grants and made them a campaign issue this year. But no data exist showing exactly how many Pell Grant recipients ever graduate from college.
What evidence there is suggests less than half do.
Pell Grants are subsidies the federal government gives to college students of primarily low-income families, although middle-class families are also eligible.
Obama has criticized the budget plan of Mitt Romney’s running mate, Paul Ryan, which reduces funding for Pell Grants.
In turn, Romney has backed away some from Ryan’s plan, saying he’d let Pell Grants grow at the rate of inflation.

Laura Waters:

According to a media advisory released yesterday, three Camden parents whose children attend Camden City Public Schools will file a class action petition on Monday demanding “immediate access to a constitutionally adequate education for their children.”
It’s sort of an inversion of the Abbott litigation, which resulted many years ago in a State Supreme Court ruling that children trapped in poor urban districts were denied access to the same educational opportunities as New Jersey children in wealthier districts. Therefore, ruled the Court, the State must fund our 31 poorest districts (called “Abbotts”) at the same level as our wealthiest. Education Law Center has a terrific history of the litigation and all the decisions on its website.

Jarrett Skorup:

If the principal at your child’s school was rated “ineffective” by the district, would you have the right to know? According to one school district and a state department, the answer is “no.”
Danny Shaw, a reporter for Heritage Newspapers, made a simple FOIA request for the one principal rated “ineffective” by Willow Run Community Schools. The state denied the request because the information was “of a personal nature” and disclosing it would constitute an “unwarranted invasion of an individual’s privacy.”

Jonathan Butcher:

One year ago, the Wall Street Journal dubbed 2011 “the year of school choice,” opining that “this year is shaping up as the best for reformers in a very long time.” Such quotes were bound to circulate among education reformers and give traditional opponents of school choice, such as teachers unions, heartburn. Thirteen states enacted new programs that allow K-12 students to choose a public or private school instead of attending their assigned school, and similar bills were under consideration in more than two dozen states.
With so much activity, school choice moved from the margins of education reform debates and became the headline. In January 2012, Washington Post education reporter Michael Alison Chandler said school choice has become “a mantra of 21st-century education reform,” citing policies across the country that have traditional public schools competing for students alongside charter schools and private schools. “It took us 20 years to pass the first 20 private school-choice programs in America and in the 21st year we passed 7 new programs,” says Scott Jensen with the American Federation for Children (AFC), a school-choice advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. “So we went from passing, on average, one each year, to seven in one fell swoop.” Programs enacted in 2011 include:
a tax-credit scholarship program in North Carolina
Arizona’s education savings account system for K-12 students

Paula Marantz Cohen:

Three subjects that are fundamental to leading an examined life go unaddressed in the college curriculum: money, leisure, and death. All students should be required to take a single course that considers these subjects together.
Money, you will say, is already taught in college. More students than ever enroll in business programs, and economics is among the most popular academic majors. But I am speaking about money in personal and philosophical ways that these academic subjects don’t take up.
This means thinking about money in a larger context: How important is it to you, and how much of it do you need to lead the life you want? Tolstoy addresses these questions cogently in his short story “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” In it, a peasant farmer is told that he can own as much land as he can encircle in a day. The man sets his sights high, pushing himself to run around a very large space, and when he finishes, drops dead.

AFP:

PARIS — French President Francois Hollande potentially won the hearts of thousands of future voters on Tuesday by announcing he wants to abolish homework.
Unveiling a new education programme, Hollande said school work should “be done at school, rather than at home”, to foster educational equality because some students do not have support at home.
He also however advocated a return to the four-and-a-half-day school week from the current four-day week in place in most French schools.

Mallory Factor:

Imagine thousands of government employees reporting to work each morning at their government offices and then doing no government work. They use government workspace, government telephones and government computers, all while working on projects unknown and unidentified to their government employers. They receive hefty taxpayer-funded salaries, promotions, bonuses and benefits, plus generous government pensions when they retire–all without doing any work on behalf of the taxpayer. Instead, they work as paid political operatives for powerful government unions.
Welcome to the common practice of “official time.” Sometimes called “release time,” it’s a mechanism by which the government pays union officials to work on union matters during their government workdays. This mechanism–enshrined in law and contracts–is an enormous subsidy to public-employee unions, who defend it fiercely.
The Office of Personnel Management reports that federal employees spent over three million hours on official time in 2010, costing the taxpayers about $137 million in salary and benefits costs.

The Pioneer Institute:

Pioneer Institute is thrilled to announce the second annual Ruth and Lovett Peters Fellowship, an opportunity for a current or recent graduate student with a passionate interest in education policy and strong entrepreneurial and analytic abilities.
The fellow, who carries the title of Ruth & Lovett Peters Fellow, will develop a broad range of research and public policy skills; he or she will also have an opportunity to devise and complete a “Lead” project, which can consist of research or a practical policy project. The Fellowship will commence in the spring/summer of 2013.
Forge Your Future in Public Policy
Click to download forms:
The Ruth and Lovett Peters Fellowship will commence in the spring/summer of 2013. A Peters Fellow at Pioneer Institute will:

• Enhance leadership skills
• Gain extensive training in research writing and the peer review process
• Apply statistical knowledge to research output
• Publish at least one research paper that may be sponsored by Pioneer
• Develop public speaking experience
• Procure grant-writing experience
• Develop wide-ranging social media communications experience
• Advance presentation skills
• Develop a broad network within the public policy community
• Participate in coordinating a policy event
• Interact with opinion writers
• Learn how to successfully market a research project

The Fellowship may span up to 15 months. During the first six months of the Fellowship, the fellow will receive training and research assistance as well as develop a thorough grounding in think tank and idea marketing. Staff and outside trainers will ensure skill acquisition in research project assistance, op-ed and press release writing, blogging, foundation grant management, event direction, and public speaking.
During the final nine months, the fellow will work on a self-directed “Lead” project and may continue to work out of Pioneer’s office in Boston or, if mutually agreed with Pioneer, work remotely. The “Lead” project, defined and managed by the fellow, can be oriented toward research or practice. Pioneer’s staff will continue to be available for the Fellow’s guidance during this project phase. The Lead project will be compatible with Pioneer’s mission and approved by Pioneer’s
Executive Director prior to this second phase of the fellowship.
The Institute’s education policy priorities are related to charter, vocational, and virtual schools; inter-district public and private school choice; standardized testing and assessments; and teacher quality. Applicants are encouraged to submit proposals for projects as part of the application process.
The Ruth & Lovett Peters Fellowship is available to applicants with Master’s level course completion; preferably those with an MBA, MPA, MPP, other Master’s programs or those currently enrolled in a doctoral program. The Fellow will report to James Stergios, Pioneer’s
Executive Director.
The Fellow will receive a stipend ranging from $45,000 to $56,000, depending on experience and other criteria, for the 15-month period. Doctoral students may be eligible for a higher stipend.
Mandatory Requirements for Application

• Reside in the Boston area during the initial six months of the program.
• Be a recent graduate or currently enrolled in an accredited Masters or PhD program.
• Possess a passion for public policy and goals consistent with Pioneer’s mission.
• Possess solid skills in quantitative analysis, evidenced by graduate-level statistics and methods courses.
• Be a U.S. citizen, have permanent residency, or possess Curricular Practical Training (CPT) authorization.
  Applications and Process

Applications must be submitted and received electronically by November 30, 2012. Selection of the fellow will be determined by a team consisting of both Pioneer Institute staff as well as external professionals.
No application will be considered unless all of the required information is submitted by the deadline. Please e-mail:

• Application form (attached).
• A copy of both undergraduate and graduate transcripts (if selected, an official copy will be requested).
• A recommendation from a faculty member using the form included above.
• An essay (no greater than 600 words) explaining why you chose your current field of study, why your goals are consistent with Pioneer’s mission and how this Fellowship would help you to achieve your goals. We encourage you to also include the nature of projects you would propose for the last nine months of the Fellowship (with an understanding that the projects are subject to refinement).
• If selected to proceed further, an interview will be conducted.

If you have questions about the fellowship, please contact:
Mary Z. Connaughton
Director of Finance and Administration
Pioneer Institute
85 Devonshire Street
Boston, MA 02109
E-mail: mconnaughton@pioneerinstitute.org

The Economist:

CLIP ON A harness, lift your legs and hurtle down a wire towards the sharp corners of a 15th-century Rajasthani fort. As you whizz, you might have a few niggling doubts. Was the zip-wire serviced by someone who knew what he was doing? Is the safety adviser any good? Who is trained in first aid?
Fortunately the staff in Neemrana, a tourist spot some 130km south-west of Delhi, are on the ball. Raj Kumar, the lead instructor of Flying Fox, has an impressive (if not entirely relevant) qualification as a Master of Philosophy in ancient Indian history. “I had planned to do my PhD, but this opportunity came along,” he says. The outfit’s British owner-manager, Jonathan Walter, explains that getting and keeping reliable workers is his greatest headache. The problem is not so much the onerous labour laws but finding skilled people. To deal with foreigners his staff need good English; for Indian customers they need social skills to cajole the reluctant into the walk up the hill.

freakonomics

A new working paper (abstract; PDF) from William N. Evans, Timothy J. Moore, and Craig Garthwaite presents one explanation for the decline in black high-school graduation rates beginning in the 1980s:

We propose the rise of crack cocaine markets as an explanation for the end to the convergence in black-white educational outcomes beginning in the mid-1980s. After constructing a measure to date the arrival of crack markets in cities and states, we show large increases in murder and incarceration rates after these dates. Black high school graduation rates also decline, and we estimate that crack markets accounts for between 40 and 73 percent of the fall in black male high school graduation rates. We argue that the primary mechanism is reduced educational investments in response to decreased returns to schooling.

How did crack cocaine depress schooling returns? “Crack markets had three primary impacts on young black males: an increased probability of being murdered, an increased risk of incarceration, and a potential source of income,” explain the authors. “Each limits the benefits of education.” In other words, high school looks less attractive when you’re more likely to end up dead or in jail, or earn money.

Bjorn Carey:

New research from Stanford shows that brain scans can identify the neural differences between these two children, and could one day lead to an early warning system for struggling students.
The researchers scanned the brain anatomy of 39 children once a year for three consecutive years. The students then took standardized tests to gauge their cognitive, language and reading skills.
In each case, the rate of development (measured by fractional anisotropy, or FA) in the white matter regions of the brain, which are associated with reading, accurately predicted their test scores.

Laura Waters:

Many of us are preoccupied with behind-the-scenes election questions this week. Does the panicky Obama campaign really think that Big Bird is the President’s best surrogate? Is the Sesame Street reference meant as a subliminal reminder of the Romney Campaign’s gaffe comparing the candidate’s platform to an Etch-a-Sketch? What’s with the toy theme? Never mind. School boards in New Jersey are concerned with more substantive election questions, specifically how our new system of voting for school board members will fly during its inaugural avigation on November 6.
The Garden State has always had school board member and school board budgets on the third Tuesday in April, but on Jan 12, a new law gave communities the option of moving elections to November. This can be done in three ways: a school board resolution, municipal governing body vote, or by a petition signed by 15 percent of the voting public.
Different versions of this bill, introduced in 2008 by state Senator Shirley Turner, had died multiple deaths in committee. However, during the lame duck session last winter the bill passed with broad bipartisan support.

I hope many others, including Wisconsin, move to November elections.

Dave Copeland:

College admissions officers have learned to check applicants’ Facebook profiles, and what they see there can have a negative impact on the students’ chances. Guess what? The kids are a step ahead of them.
Parents, teachers and guidance counselors warn high school students that what they post on Facebook could hurt their chances of getting into college. And according to a Kaplan survey of college admissions officials released last week, it’s not an idle threat: More than one in four respondents said they check Google and Facebook for information on applicants, up from one in 10 when Kaplan started tracking the trend in 2008.

Doug Lederman:

It’s official: Higher education is shrinking, for the first time in at least 15 years.
Total enrollment at American colleges and universities eligible for federal financial aid fell slightly in the fall of 2011 from the year before, according to preliminary data released Tuesday by the U.S. Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics.
The data from the department’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System show that 21,554,004 students were enrolled in fall 2011, down from 21,588,124 in fall 2010. While that drop is smaller than two-tenths of one percent, it is the first such dip since at least 1996, according to officials at NCES.

Mary Carmichael

To Gerald and Lily Chow, education consultant Mark Zimny must have seemed like the answer to many parents’ prayer: Please let my child get into Harvard University.
The Chows, who lived in Hong Kong, knew little about the US educational system, but they did know that they wanted an Ivy League education for their sons. And they had money to spend on consultants like Zimny, who, they believed, could help make the dream come true.
What transpired, however, turned out to be a cautionary tale for the thousands of parents who are fueling the growing global admissions-consulting industry.
Zimny, whom they met in 2007, had credentials. He had worked as a professor at Harvard. He ran an education consultancy, IvyAdmit. And he had a plan to help the Chows’ two sons, then 16 and 14.

The Atlantic

In “The Writing Revolution,” Peg Tyre traces the problems at one troubled New York high school to a simple fact: The students couldn’t write coherent sentences. In 2009 New Dorp High made a radical change. Instead of trying to engage students through memoir exercises and creative assignments, the school required them to write expository essays and learn the fundamentals of grammar. Within two years, the school’s pass rates for the English Regents test and the global-history exam were soaring. The school’s drop-out rate — 40 percent in 2006 — has fallen to 20 percent.
The experiment suggests that the trend toward teaching creative writing was hurting American students. In a debate about Tyre’s story, we asked a range of experts, from policymakers to Freedom Writers founder Erin Gruwell, to share their thoughts on Tyre’s story

rt.com

A school district in Texas came under fire earlier this year when it announced that it would require students to wear microchip-embedded ID cards at all times. Now, students who refuse to be monitored say they are feeling the repercussions.
Since October 1, students at John Jay High School and Anson Jones Middle School in San Antonio, Texas, have been asked to attend class with photo ID cards equipped with radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips to track every pupil’s location. Educators insist that the endeavor is being rolled out in Texas to stem the rampant truancy devastating the school’s funding. If the program is judged successful, the RFID chips could soon come to 112 schools in all and affect nearly 100,000 students.
Students who refuse to walk the school halls with the card in their pocket or around their neck claim they are being tormented by instructors, and are barred from participating in certain school functions. Some also said they were turned away from common areas like cafeterias and libraries.

Susanne Amann, Sebastian Brauns and Nils Klawitter:

Experts now believe that frozen strawberries from China are behind a massive outbreak of the norovirus that recently affected thousands of schoolchildren in eastern Germany. The episode merely illustrates the deplorable state of school lunches, a problem no one seems willing to fix.
The first school lunch that Martha Payne photographed in May consisted of a croquette, a small pizza, a bit of corn and a muffin. The nine-year-old from Scotland gave the meal six out of 10 points for taste on her “food-o-meter” and four out of 10 for healthiness.
Her plan had only been to take a shot in order to show her father that the meal wasn’t enough to fill her up, she wrote on her blog. After only a week, Payne had 25,000 hits on her blog, and now hundreds of thousands are reading it.

Jon Udell:

In Why Johnny Can’t Read: And What You Can Do About It, published in 1955, Rudolf Flesch argued that our method of teaching kids to read was wrongly denying them the pleasures of “Andersen’s Fairy Tales or The Arabian Nights or Mark Twain … or anything interesting and worthwhile.” Instead, said Flesch, they get “horrible, stupid, emasculated, pointless, tasteless little readers.” It wasn’t just the lack of literary merit that incensed Flesch. He hated the rationale for those dumbed-down books. Vocabulary, it was thought, must only be introduced gradually. Nonsense, said Flesch. If you equip kids with the right conceptual tools they can read anything. But one fundamental concept — phonics, the decoding of words by mapping symbols to sounds — wasn’t being taught.
In Why Johnny Can’t Encrypt: A Usability Evaluation of PGP 5.0, presented at the 1999 USENIX Security Symposium, Alma Whitten and J.D. Tygar explored why people couldn’t figure out how to encrypt their outbound email or authenticate their inbound email. If you’ve ever used PGP you won’t be surprised by their conclusion: its user interface didn’t present the underlying model — which involves public and private keys, encryption and authentication — in a way that made sense. Of course that was true, and remains true, for every implementation of the model. User interfaces are surely part of the problem, but not the whole story. Here’s the question Whitten and Tygar asked:

Jonathan Marks:

As a politics professor, I feel I should know something about health policy, but it is mostly dread that made me sign up for Ezekiel Emanuel’s class, Health Policy and the Affordable Care Act, through Coursera. Word is that higher education is about to be disrupted by online providers, like Coursera and Udacity, and their MOOCs (massive open online courses). If students can take political philosophy with Harvard’s Michael Sandel for free, why will they pay to take it with me?
Have you seen Professor Sandel’s course? I bet I am not alone in wanting to take his more than I want to take mine. Sebastian Thrun, co-founder of Udacity, predicts that in 50 years there will be no more than 10 higher education institutions. Thrun isn’t quietly waiting for his prediction to pan out, either. Pearson VUE recently contracted to administer proctored final exams for some of Udacity’s courses, an important step toward offering credit that most colleges will find hard to reject.

crackajack.de

Daniel Willingham:

What are we to make of the seemingly miraculous success of New Dorp, the high school that is the subject of Peg Tyre’s recent Atlantic story? The history of education is littered with flavor-of-the-month interventions, many of which began at a model school, but that, once implemented elsewhere, flopped. Dejected educators then begin scouting for the next “big thing.”
Education Debate bug
See full coverage
In this instance, a heavy emphasis on writing seemed to make kids better writers, better readers, and perhaps, better thinkers. What does published research say? Is there any reason to expect that a writing curriculum, if implemented in other schools, would bring the same benefits?
There is, but implementing it correctly is no small matter.
Better writing: Perhaps the least surprising claim is that a focus on writing improves student writing. In general, there is good evidence that explicit teaching of writing makes kids better writers (for a recent review, see Graham et al, 2012). I emphasize explicit because these interventions concerned with the nuts and bolts of writing: instruction in text structure, how to use specific strategies for planning, revising, or editing text, and so on. As Tyre notes, if a teacher does not show students how to construct a paragraph or a well-written argument, some will figure out it anyway, but many will not.

Tyler Cowen:

Matt Yglesias has a good post on the recent Steven Pearlstein column. Here is Matt:
…people need to start paying much more attention to questions of tax efficiency. It’s overwhelmingly likely that we’re going to want the public sector to be a larger share of the economy in 10, 20, 30, 40 years than it is today and we need to find relatively growth-friendly ways to make that happen.
Here is Pearlstein:
From a political perspective, Baumol’s most important insight is that government spending must grow as a percentage of the economy. Most of the services that are provided by, or financed by government — health care, education, criminal justice, national security, diplomacy, industry regulation, scientific research — are those that suffer most acutely from Baumol’s disease. That’s not because of incompetence or self-interest on the part of public servants or even the socialist instincts of Democratic politicians — it’s in the nature of those activities.

der Spiegel:

A recent outbreak of illness among German schoolchildren has highlighted the questionable quality of meals served in schools. German TV chef Cornelia Poletto says that one way to improve nutrition is to get parents involved in preparing lunches — and to teach children what they are eating.
Cornelia Poletto, 41, is a well-known German chef and the mother of a 10-year-old daughter. She owns a restaurant and specialty food shop in Hamburg and appears regularly as a professional chef on television.
SPIEGEL: Ms. Poletto, you have tested many school cafeterias. What experiences have you had in doing so?
Poletto: Very different ones! But I can say this: It is only in places where parents actively volunteer that truly good food is provided.

The Madison School District’s student population increased slightly this year to 26,925, including a 7 percent increase in 4-year-old kindergarten.
Superintendent Jane Belmore noted the 4K program in its second year now reaches 90 percent of 4-year-olds who live in the district.
“We are pleased that our enrollment remains stable and that our incredibly important 4K program continues to grow,” Belmore said in a statement. “Starting learning early is key to closing gaps, and this year, our 4K program will do that important work for more students.”
The district added 275 students, about a 1 percent increase, overall. The 4K program added 125 students for a total of 1,914 participants in the optional half-day program.
It is the 12th straight year that K-12 enrollment (excluding 4K) has ranged between 24,000 and 25,000 students.

Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes

The other major change to the CBA affects the hiring process for teachers. Currently, teachers have the opportunity to seek to transfer to vacant positions at other schools until four weeks prior to the start of the school year. Once the internal transfer process has been completed, principals can select applicants for teaching positions from outside the district. It is pretty obvious that the school district was placing itself at a competitive disadvantage in hiring if it could not tell a potential new hire where he or she would be teaching until a month before school starts.
According to the new procedure that is now set forth in the CBA, teachers who find themselves surplused will be placed in new positions by the school district by May 1 of each year. Then vacant positions will be posted for internal transfers. While a change was proposed in the district’s initial bargaining proposal, the final agreement retains the requirement that principals must select an internal transfer applicant if any applicants for a vacant position possess the minimum qualifications. The internal transfer process closes on June 15 and at that point principals can choose external candidates for any positions that remain unfilled. This change represents a big step toward a hiring process that maximizes our chances to hire the kind of skilled and diverse applicants we are looking for.
As I mention above, the new agreement does not address wages. At this point we don’t have sufficient information to make any sort of decision about raising salaries for the 2013-14 school year. Most importantly, we have no idea what the governor and new legislature will do about revenue limits for the next biennium and so we don’t know whether we will be able to increase our spending and by how much, or whether we will have to cut our per-pupil spending, as was the case for the first year of the current biennium.

Much more on the Madison School District’s rather unique action, here.

Bill Jackson, via a kind reader’s email:

Tomorrow, we’ll talk about my dream school information system – what I’d really like to see out there to power informed school choice.
Before we do that, though, I’d like to share how I would go about assessing the quality of an elementary school if I was choosing one for my daughters today. This is all in the spirit of keepin’ it real. I’d love to hear your ideas.
As the CEO of GreatSchools, I have to start with the data, of course. At GreatSchools.org, I can access data about test scores and student diversity. In some locations, I can also find about special programs, curriculum, extra-curricular activities and transportation options. This is great stuff – it helps get me oriented.

Jeanette Joran:

My job provides me the opportunity to travel a lot. I’ve visited many countries and cities of the world, but I still consider this area home.
I guess a love of math runs in my family. My sister is a math teacher, and it was my favorite subject, too. In fact, you could say she was my first teacher, as she would come home from school and teach me what she had learned that day.
While my math teachers were inspirational to me, there was another teacher who encouraged me to think more broadly and be open to new ideas. The encouragement I received from her helped me to build confidence in my own abilities. Math remained my favorite subject, but I was always interested in new ideas, exploring different concepts

Alan Schwarz:

When Dr. Michael Anderson hears about his low-income patients struggling in elementary school, he usually gives them a taste of some powerful medicine: Adderall.
The pills boost focus and impulse control in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Although A.D.H.D is the diagnosis Dr. Anderson makes, he calls the disorder “made up” and “an excuse” to prescribe the pills to treat what he considers the children’s true ill — poor academic performance in inadequate schools.
“I don’t have a whole lot of choice,” said Dr. Anderson, a pediatrician for many poor families in Cherokee County, north of Atlanta. “We’ve decided as a society that it’s too expensive to modify the kid’s environment. So we have to modify the kid.”

Pat Eaton-Robb:

Webster Bank signed on this summer to become a major sponsor of University of Connecticut athletics and help build a new basketball training center, but UConn has refused to say how much the bank is spending or what exactly it will get in return for its millions.
Though it is a public institution, UConn keeps some of the financial information about its athletic fundraising secret by using private entities.
Many universities use private tax-exempt foundations to raise money, but what separates Connecticut from other schools is a measure passed by the state legislature a decade ago that exempts the University of Connecticut Foundation from state freedom of information laws. Also, the state Supreme Court in February ruled the school can keep its lists of donors and season-ticketholders private, saying they amount to trade secrets.

Medical News Today:

Pop quiz! Tests are good for: (a) Assessing what you’ve learned; (b) Learning new information; (c) a & b; (d) None of the above.
The correct answer?
According to research from psychological science, it’s both (a) and (b) – while testing can be useful as an assessment tool, the actual process of taking a test can also help us to learn and retain new information over the long term and apply it across different contexts.
New research published in journals of the Association for Psychological Science explores the nuanced interactions between testing, memory, and learning and suggests possible applications for testing in educational settings.

OnPoint:

The Supreme Court picks up another hot potato. Affirmative Action is back before the high court. We’ll look at the issue and the stakes.

http://www.census.gov/hhes/school/data/cps/historical/TableA-4.pdf

Tony’s Math Blog:

I’m teaching graph theory this year. It was one of my favourite areas of mathematics when I was a student. It contains many gems, ranging from with Euler’s solution to the problem of the seven bridges of Konigsberg to the power of Ramsey’s Theorem. The arguments seem to me to be unusually varied, and often sufficiently elementary that great depth of study is not required.
I have had very little contact with graph theory in the time since I graduated. As an undergraduate I used Robin Wilson’s Introduction to Graph Theory, and I am now using it as the basis of my course. I remember enjoying the book in my youth, and finding it approachable, but I don’t remember finding the material as straightforward as it now seems. (My students aren’t finding it entirely straightforward, either, but that may be my fault.)
Why is this? I don’t think I’m a better mathematician than I was 35 years ago. In terms of solving exam questions, I would not perform as I did when I was twenty. Even with practice, I am sure I could not get back to that level, and not only because I no longer value that kind of cleverness enough to put the effort in. I now have a much better general understanding of mathematics and how it all fits together, but I no longer have the ability to master detail that I once did.

Jay Greene:

Last week’s presidential debate revealed one area of agreement between the candidates: We need more teachers. “Let’s hire another hundred thousand math and science teachers,” proposed President Obama, adding that “Governor Romney doesn’t think we need more teachers.”
Mr. Romney quickly replied, “I reject the idea that I don’t believe in great teachers or more teachers.” He just opposes earmarking federal dollars for this purpose, believing instead that “every school district, every state should make that decision on their own.”
Let’s hope state and local officials have that discretion–and choose to shrink the teacher labor force rather than expand it. Hiring hundreds of thousands of additional teachers won’t improve student achievement. It will bankrupt state and local governments, whose finances are already buckling under bloated payrolls with overly generous and grossly underfunded pension and health benefits.

Jessica Bock:

The moment was brief but telling for Lydia Hsiuling Chen as she watched one of her students accidentally step on the foot of another as they headed out to recess.
“Dui bu qi,” the kindergartner said quickly as she continued on her way. The classmate, looking slightly annoyed but accepting of her apology, muttered his reply, telling her it was OK — also in Chinese.
It was a natural inclination to use what was an entirely foreign language to them less than two months ago. And it was an early sign of success for The Chinese School, the newest program that began this year at St. Louis Language Immersion Schools.
“They are not just learning Chinese, they are living with Chinese,” said Chen, who serves as head of the school.

Richard Whidmire:

Over the past decade, hundreds of articles and scores of book have chronicled “boy troubles,” the odd phenomenon of boys flailing in school and men adrift in life.
That is so yesterday’s story. Today’s story is about what happens to women when men fail, and the storytellers are women. Look no further than The End of Men and the Rise of Women, by Hanna Rosin, and The Richer Sex: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners is Transforming Sex, Love, and Family, by Liza Mundy.
Why shouldn’t women be the ones to write about the world of failing men? Women actually read books (Checked out the men’s vs. women’s section in your local bookstore lately?). You can’t argue with the market. If women are ruling our colleges and taking over fields such as veterinary medicine, clinical psychology and pharmacy, and well, pretty much everything other than plumbing, they might as well chronicle the demise of men.

Tyler Durden:

Finally, those curious why the government will do everything in its power to pump any and every possible dollar into the economy under the guise of student subsidies, here it is again: at last check there were $914 billion in Federally-Funded student loans and rising at a rate of $20 billion per month.

Matthew DeFour

Madison Teachers Inc. wants to shake up the Madison School Board after another negotiation in which it conceded several member benefits to stave off the effects of the state’s new collective bargaining law.
MTI’s weekly newsletter equates the School Board with the Legislature and Gov. Scott Walker, and calls the board’s statements opposing changes in collective bargaining “not worth the paper they were written on.”
“Keep in mind that to get fully out from under the cloud caused by Act 10, what is needed is a change in the Legislature, the governor and the Board of Education,” the newsletter states. “All can be impacted by elections this fall, next spring and in 2014.”

John Torinus

The faculty at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee (UWM) has received no general raises over the last five years, so it has become a target for poaching. The campus has lost 40 faculty members recently to competing institutions.
Crippled from of a decade of major cuts from governors and legislatures of both parties, the entire university system is in a financial straight jacket.
Leadership at UWM is trying to fund $2 million as a stop-gap to retain good professors, but needs as much as $18 million to bring pay levels up to par.
Lots of luck. The 2013-2015 state budget, now in the making, has already been hammered by a request from Dennis Smith, the governor’s secretary for health services, requested an increase of more than $650 million for Medicaid over the two years. That bloated request will chew up much of the new revenue dollars coming from the meager growth in the economy and will crowd out investments in big priorities like education.
Fortunately, there is a solution.

the local/Sweden:

A talented head cook at a school in central Sweden has been told to stop baking fresh bread and to cut back on her wide-ranging veggie buffets because it was unfair that students at other schools didn’t have access to the unusually tasty offerings.
Annika Eriksson, a lunch lady at school in Falun, was told that her cooking is just too good.
Pupils at the school have become accustomed to feasting on newly baked bread and an assortment of 15 vegetables at lunchtime, but now the good times are over.

I’ve seen similar issues in Madison, with respect to extracurricular activities.

ultimath:

The model method is a very powerful problem-solving strategy extensively used in the Primary Mathematics curriculum in Singapore, sometimes referred to as “Singapore Math” by other countries. Model Method help students visualize and simplify a math problem in a pictorial way. It was developed and popularized by Mr Hector Chee, a Singapore teacher, in 1990s.
Versatile and used in various topics
It is used to teach a wide range of Mathematics topics taught in the Primary Mathematics curriculum in Primary schools (elementary schools). Some of these include arithmetic, fractions, percentage, decimals, average, ratio and of course various problem sums testing these topics. It provides the pictorial perspective of the Mathematical problems and also provides easy analysis of ‘parts whole’ and comparison between quantities

Alix:

Keeping students in school has been a problem in school districts nationwide. In urban areas, studies have shown that just 50% of students graduate with a high school diploma. Across the country, efforts to curb school absenteeism and truancy vary from extravagant to practical, with a plethora of measures in between.
On the extravagant side, Get Schooled, a non-profit based in New York, awarded a middle school in Seattle a free concert by R&B performer NeYo, as the prize for winning an attendance competition. Similarly, Get Schooled offers computer-games and weekly wake-up calls recorded by popular celebrities as motivation for students to show up for school.

Josh Moon:

The Alabama State Department of Education will investigate allegations of improper grade changes within Montgomery Public Schools, state superintendent of education Tommy Bice said in a statement Friday morning.
Bice said MPS superintendent Barbara Thompson requested the state agency conduct an investigation, which will be separate from an internal investigation operated by MPS.
The Montgomery Advertiser reported Thursday on allegations of grade changes, charges that were made by numerous current and former MPS teachers at three Montgomery high schools — Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and Sidney Lanier.

Haisten Willis:

“Local school boards do not have the legal authority to expend funds or other resources to advocate or oppose the ratification of a constitutional amendment by the voters,” the letter reads. “They may not do this directly or indirectly through associations to which they may belong.”
Olens cites Georgia law in his letter, holding that elected officials have no right to free speech at taxpayer expense. The letter does say elected officials have the right to support or oppose the amendment in their individual capacities.
Douglas County School System Superintendent Dr. Gordon Pritz responded that the resolution doesn’t attempt to influence voters. Also of note, school board funds were not used in the passage of its resolution.
“The resolution our board passed 4-1 expresses the board’s view, but did not urge voters to take an action on the amendment at all,” Pritz said. “The board has a right to express itself on educational matters of public concern. In fact I think they have a moral and ethical obligation to do so, as do I. This is also a normal part of board and superintendent duties and practices as evidenced by the three other resolutions the board passed that same night.”
Read more: Douglas County Sentinel – BOE’s charter school stance draws complaint

Steve Hsu:

This Lansing State Journal article covers my recent appointment as VP of Research and Graduate studies at MSU. It’s journalism, so as you can expect they emphasized potentially controversial topics like my work in genomics. (I expend about 10% of my research effort on this work, but it’s much more titillating than the quantum mechanics of black holes!)
In order to set the record straight I have excerpted from the article and added my own comments.
… He is working with BGI-Shenzhen, a Chinese company that runs one of the world’s largest gene-sequencing operations, on a project to identify the genetic basis of intelligence.

The Economist:

ONCE upon a time most of the tiny island-state of Singapore was a jungle. That is nearly all gone now, but the country is still heavily populated by tigers. These strict, unyielding felines, celebrated by Amy Chua in her book on the superiority of Chinese parenting, “The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother”, load their cubs down with extra homework and tuition to make them excel at school. Western parents are usually horrified at the pressure the tiger mums exert on their children to get better grades or become concert violinists, preferably before puberty. But in Singapore this style of parenting, especially among the ethnic Chinese majority, is rarely questioned.
Imagine, then, the surprise when the prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, launched an attack on tiger mothers in a speech in late August to mark Singapore’s national day. Most of his remarks celebrated Singapore’s success, as usual. But then he berated parents for coaching their three- or four-year-old children to give them that extra edge over the five-year-old competition. And he added: “Please let your children have their childhood…Instead of growing up balanced and happy, he grows up narrow and neurotic. No homework is not a bad thing. It’s good for young children to play, and to learn through play.”

Vivian Yee:

Outside Pittsburgh, they are proclaiming a strike, taking to Twitter and Facebook to spread the word. In a village near Milwaukee, hundreds staged a boycott. In a small farming and ranching community in western Kansas, they have produced a parody video. And in Parsippany, N.J., the protest is six days old and counting.
They are high school students, and their complaint is about lunch — healthier, smaller and more expensive than ever.
The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which required public schools to follow new nutritional guidelines this academic year to receive extra federal lunch aid, has created a nationwide version of the age-old parental challenge: persuading children to eat what is good for them.

Catherine Rampell:

Enrollment in college is still climbing, but students are increasingly saying no to graduate school in the United States.
New enrollment in graduate schools fell last year for the second consecutive year, according to a report from the Council of Graduate Schools.
The declines followed surges in enrollment in 2008 and 2009 as many unemployed workers sought a haven during the recession. Financial considerations probably played a role in the shift. Students may be dissuaded from continuing their education in part because of the increasing debt burden from their undergraduate years.
Additionally, state budget cuts are forcing public institutions to reduce aid for graduate students, who in some disciplines have traditionally been paid to attend postgraduate programs.

Dan McCrum:

Bill Gross has compared the US government’s reliance on debt financing to a “crystal meth” addict, in the latest in a series of dire warnings from one of the most influential investors in the bond market.
“The US, in fact, is a serial offender, an addict whose habit extends beyond weed or cocaine and who frequently pleasures itself with budgetary crystal meth”, said Mr Gross, who manages the $273bn Total Return bond fund for Pimco.
In an investment outlook that began with a discussion of the 69-year old investor’s lack of long-term memory, Mr Gross returned again to a theme that he has visited over the last decade: unsustainable US spending.
Mr Gross places the US in a “ring of fire” that includes countries with precarious finances such as Greece, Spain and Japan.

Alan Borsuk:

One of the most dramatic signs of the momentous changes in how Wisconsin is trying to improve schools, teachers and student performance is about to hit every public school community in the state.
There have been a lot of warnings that a new way of picturing how schools are doing is coming and that the view isn’t going to be as cheery as the old grades. But it’s unlikely many people except school officials have been paying attention.
You can bet a lot more people will take notice when the state Department of Public Instruction releases report cards for every school and school district on Oct. 22.
The new data is going to be massive and sometimes complex. There will be a two-page summary report on each school, as well as an 18-page report.
Backers of the new approach – and a broad array of education and political figures – say that the report cards are a pillar of efforts to get more children in Wisconsin better prepared to go on to college and the work world.
But a lot of people almost surely will look at the grades for their local schools and ask: What in heaven’s name is going on? How did local schools we thought were A or B quality suddenly get worse?

Richard P. Phelps, via a kind email:

n the excellent film The Insider, Jeffrey Wigand, an ex-tobacco company executive, faces a dilemma. In return for a severance package and the health insurance coverage it provides his family, he signs confidentiality agreements promising not to reveal the company’s research effort to boost the addictive power of cigarettes. When it appears that he is preparing to speak to journalists anyway, tobacco company-contracted PR hacks assassinate Wigand’s character in the national media, and local thugs threaten his family’s safety. In the end, Wigand strikes the match that blows up tobacco industry deceit on CBS’s Sixty Minutes televised investigative news program.
I was reminded of Wigand’s story recently when a testing industry executive warned me not to reveal the specifics of a secret document currently being written–a document that, in my judgment, will effectively embed the findings of fraudulent, biased research in educational testing into US law. Among the several nasty effects should be an enormous waste of taxpayer dollars on millions of new and worse-than-worthless “audit tests”. The number of tests administered to our elementary-secondary students could double in some areas, but the quality of the results available from all tests will deteriorate.
Though this document will profoundly affect all Americans, whether directly involved in education or not, you cannot see it before it is published in its final, legal form, as a fait accompli in early 2013. I and perhaps a few hundred other testing aficionados read an early draft in 2011 but, legally, we cannot show it to you. We all signed confidentiality agreements.
Education insiders are currently writing in secret what is arguably the single most influential document in US education and psychology. Last updated in 1999, the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing is being revised and, if on schedule, will be presented in its completed form to the public in early 2013. (The testing Standards should not be confused with more common, and far more public, content standards, a.k.a. curriculum).

Richard P. Phelps, via a kind email:

Within several months, the most important document in US education testing–the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing–will incorporate the conclusions of biased, irreparably flawed research that favors education’s vested interests. School districts and taxpayers will be compelled to pay for the administration of more tests, perhaps twice as many in some areas. But, these new tests will not be used for any of the proven benefits of testing, such as feedback or motivation. Their only purpose will be to “audit” other, already-existing tests.
Why do current tests need “auditing” you ask? Allegedly, scores and score trends on standardized tests with consequences, or “stakes”, can never be trusted and need to be verified by those from parallel “no stakes” tests. Presumably, scores from no-stakes tests, no matter how administered and no matter who administers them, are as trustworthy as a pug-nosed Pinocchio.
The notion reminds me of the Will Smith-Jon Voight film Enemy of the State, in which corrupt politicians and federal intelligence agents misuse their power to monitor their fellow citizens for mutual self-aggrandizement. After the miscreants’ criminal activity is exposed, officials promise to “monitor the monitors”, apparently within the same institutional structures that harbored the original malfeasance. To that announcement, the Regina King character in the film replies “Well, who’s gonna monitor the monitors of the monitors?”

The Economist:

DEMOGRAPHERS like to say that Texas today is the United States tomorrow. That being the case, a look at San Antonio–the second-largest city in Texas, and seventh-largest in the country–suggests that America had better get cracking. In many respects the city is in an enviable position: young, diverse, and growing by bounds. It also includes a huge number of children–a quarter of whom live in poverty, most of whom need more education, and all of whom live in a state where government spending is a hard sell. At the Democratic National Convention recently the mayor, Julián Castro, made a pitch for change: “We know that you can’t be pro-business unless you’re pro-education,” he said.
To that end, he said, the city was working for a bigger pre-school programme. The idea is part of a national trend towards early childhood education. “Give me a child until he is seven,” runs the famous Jesuit saying, “and I will give you the man.” Why wait that long, though? By the time children start kindergarten, some are manifestly more ready than others, in terms of their health, cognitive skills, and ability to pay attention to the teacher.

Slate:

When you hear Salman Khan’s story, it sounds like an Internet-age fairy tale, one that goes something like this. Once upon a time, a brainy MIT graduate working as a hedge-fund analyst started tutoring his cousin in math and science online. He decided to make YouTube videos of his tutorials. The videos racked up millions of views and reached audiences around the world, and appreciative students offered stirring testimonials. After three years, the hedge-fund analyst quit his day job to set up an educational nonprofit called The Khan Academy. The mission: provide a world-class education to anyone, anywhere for free.
Khan knows that his mission statement is a bit grandiose, but he believes the Khan Academy’s online teaching materials, including its archive of more than 3,000 videos, have the power to reach students in ways that classroom settings sometimes can’t. The Khan Academy combines video tutorials with exercises and problems tailored to an individual student’s performance level.

Juan Carlos Llorca:

During his sophomore year, Jose Avalos was urged by a principal to drop out of high school. The next year, his brother was told to do the same after entering the 10th grade. A third Avalos brother shared the same fate in 2009.
Administrators at Bowie High School cited excessive tardiness in their efforts to remove the siblings. But now the brothers suspect they were targeted for an entirely different reason: The district was trying to push out hundreds of low-performing sophomores to prevent them from taking accountability tests. The scheme was designed to help El Paso schools raise academic standards, qualify for more federal money and ensure the superintendent got hefty bonuses.
“I thought I was going crazy. I even doubted my sons,” said the boys’ mother, Grisel Avalos. She said she tried several times to keep her sons in class, but district officials “were on the side of the teachers and the principal.”

channel3000

Don and Jan Weideman lost their youngest son in June after a year-and-a-half battle with heroin, and they have formed a group to address the growing concern about heroin in Columbia County.
Don Weideman found his son, Cody, dead in their home from a heroin overdose.
Cody’s addiction was triggered by a girlfriend who also used the drug. His parents went through inpatient and outpatient programs, counseling and treatment options.
It’s an experience Don Weideman described as “a living hell.”
“Children are supposed to bury parents. Parents aren’t supposed to bury children,” Don Weideman said.

Blaire Briody:

Just 56 percent of college students complete four-year degrees within six years, according to a 2011 Harvard Graduate School of Education study. Among the 18 developed countries in the OECD, the U.S. was dead last for the percentage of students who completed college once they started it ― even behind Slovakia.
College dropouts tend to be male, and give reasons such as cost, not feeling prepared, and not being able to juggle family, school and jobs, according to the Harvard study. An American Institutes for Research report last year estimated that college dropouts cost the nation $4.5 billion in lost earnings and taxes.

Erin Richards:

wenty years ago, Paula Ambos enrolled her daughter at MacDowell Montessori School after a friend raved about how well the style of education worked for her kid.
Ambos started helping in the classroom – common for Montessori parents because the “freedom with responsibility” philosophy of learning requires at least one classroom assistant – then pursued formal teacher training herself.
Today, she’s the primary teacher of a 3-, 4- and 5-year-old kindergarten classroom at MacDowell, which incorporated a high school this year and became one of several new or revamped public Montessori options that Milwaukee Public Schools is championing to parents all over the city.
The public Montessori-school community in Milwaukee is now one of the largest in the country – growing to eight schools under the MPS umbrella, and a ninth that operates as a City of Milwaukee-authorized charter school.

Julie Halpert

urdue University was always a back-up school for Kemsley Corell. But once she was accepted, she was won over by the barrage of mail advertising the school. She received plenty of marketing materials from other schools, but what impressed her about Purdue were the letters from faculty and staff from the Animal Sciences department, the College of Agriculture. She even received one from the dean himself.
Specific phrases in the letters made them seem personal – like the one from Marcos Fernandez, associate dean at the College of Agriculture, who underlined the words, “Congratulations” and “I look forward to meeting and getting to know you.” The letters made the Pleasant Grove, Utah applicant , feel “like I was important to Purdue and that I could really fit in there.” She started as a freshman at Purdue this fall.
Corell’s story is music to the ears of Teri Lucie Thompson, chief marketing officer for Purdue University. She’s one of the many marketing pros hired recently by universities to reach out more aggressively to students. The economic downturn and growing competition among institutions for students is prompting many schools to employ increasingly sophisticated marketing techniques to appeal to their pool of applicants – including those that can pay full price – and ensure they’ll get the highest caliber of students.
The term “marketing” once was a dirty word at universities and colleges, as many faculty felt the school’s stellar reputation should be enough to draw students. But now many schools have hired chief marketing officers, or CMOs, with six-figure salaries. Thompson, who makes a base salary of $265,000 with an annual 14-percent pension contribution, points to Bentley University and Utah State University as just two recent examples. Others schools are also hiring outside marketing firms.
“More than ever, higher education is a buyer’s market,” said Tony Pals, a spokesman for the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. He says students are increasingly concerned about the economic returns of their degree and are looking for a college with the best value.

And, many colleges spend a boatload of money on marketing, often paid by prospective students’ application fees.

Rebecca Rosen:

Good morning, class. I’d like you all to open your books to Act I, Scene 2, Line 398.
Pages rustle as everyone flips through their books in search of that spot.
“Usually there’s a whole lot of shuffling,” says Bryn Mawr professor Katharine Rowe. But not if the class is using an app she and Notre Dame professor Elliott Visconsi built. In their app of Shakespeare’s Tempest students can just enter “1.2.398” and be transported there immediately. Or, alternatively, search for the words: “Full fathom five thy father lies.”
That tool “gets my students on the line, at the same time, almost instantly. That’s a big deal for a Shakespeare prof,” she says. “We get our brains faster into the text that way.”

Dana Goldstein:

Unemployment among workers without a college degree is at a staggering 24 percent, but young college grads without an advanced degree are also suffering from the worst jobs crisis since World War II, with about 19 percent out of work or underemployed for their level of education. Is it fair to ask American schools to respond to the Great Recession? Great teachers and principals can help students maximize their potential, but they can’t make firms hire workers.
But the education system is not powerless in the face of high unemployment–as long as employers are partners. What’s clear is that there are a few, relatively small sectors of the economy in which there are real shortages of trained workers. Some of those sectors require an advanced degree or very high-level skills, such as in engineering or computer programming. But not all of them do. One of these sectors is mid-skill manufacturing. There is a shortage of machinists who can operate the new, computer-programmed, robotic assembly lines that build cars, turbines, generators, steel and iron plumbing products, armaments, and shipping and packing equipment. There may be as many as 600,000 unfilled manufacturing jobs of this type, but compared with their European counterparts, American companies have shown little willingness to invest in training workers to fill these positions.

Gillian Tett:

Six months ago, they dropped dozens of boxed iPads into two extremely remote villages in Ethiopia, where the population was completely illiterate, dirt poor and had no prior exposure to electronics. They did not leave any instructions, aside from telling the village elders that the iPads were designed for kids aged four to 11. They also showed one adult how to charge the iPads with a solar-powered device. Then the researchers vanished and monitored what happened next by making occasional visits and tracking the behaviour of the children via Sim cards, USB sticks and cameras installed in the iPads.
The results, which will be unveiled in Boston later this month, are thought-provoking, particularly for anyone involved in the education business. Within minutes of the iPads landing among the mud huts, the kids had unpacked the boxes and worked out how to turn them on.
Then, in both villages, activity coalesced around a couple of child leaders, who made the mental leap to explore those tablets – and taught the others what to do. In one village, this leader turned out to be a partly disabled child: although he had never been a dominant personality before, he was a natural explorer, so became the teacher.
The discovery process then became intense. When the children used the iPads, they did not behave like western adults might, namely sitting with a machine each on their laps in isolation. Instead they huddled together, touching and watching each other’s machines, constantly swapping knowledge. Within days, they were using the pre-installed apps, with games, movies and educational lessons. After a couple of months, some were singing the American “alphabet song” and recognising letters (at the request of the Ethiopian government, the machines were all in English). More startling still, one gang of kids even worked out how to disable a block that the Boston-based researchers had installed into the machines, which was supposed to stop them taking pictures of themselves. And all of this apparently happened without any adult supervision – and anyone in those mud huts having handled text before.

Andy Kroll:

It was the greatest education system the world had ever seen. They built it into the eucalyptus-dotted Berkeley hills and under the bright lights of Los Angeles, down in the valley in Fresno and in the shadows of the San Bernardino Mountains. Hundreds of college campuses, large and small, two-year and four-year, stretching from California’s emerald forests in the north to the heat-scorched Inland Empire in the south. Each had its own DNA, but common to all was this: they promised a “public” education, accessible and affordable, to those with means and those without, a door with a welcome mat into the ivory tower, an invitation to a better life.
Then California bled that system dry. Over three decades, voters starved their state–and so their colleges and universities–of cash. Politicians siphoned away what money remained and spent it more on imprisoning people, not educating them. College administrators grappled with shriveling state support by jacking up tuitions, tacking on new fees, and so asking more each year from increasingly pinched students and families. Today, many of those students stagger under a heap of debt as they linger on waiting lists to get into the over-subscribed classes they need to graduate.

Kevin McGill:

After saying last August that a public records request would be fulfilled, Louisiana’s education department is again refusing to provide The Associated Press with records on how schools were chosen to participate in Gov. Bobby Jindal’s new statewide voucher program.
The Associated Press requested the records on June 12. The department initially rejected the request on Aug. 3. However, a spokesman for Education Superintendent John White later told an AP capital bureau reporter that the records request would be fulfilled in September — after the final voucher enrollment numbers were tallied.

Kurt Streeter:

Kent Taylor, superintendent of education in southern Kern County, was selected Wednesday to lead the Inglewood school district — the first major move by the state after its takeover of the financially troubled district.
Before his Kern County stint, Taylor worked as a teacher, principal, administrator and school board member in several Southern California districts, mostly in the San Bernardino area. He grew up in Inglewood and graduated from Inglewood High in 1982, facts he emphasized repeatedly during a Wednesday news conference.
The appointment is about “coming back to the community that I love, the community that produced me,” he said, recalling several teachers who mentored him as a youngster. “This is a great district, a wonderful district, and we have great things happening here…. Do we need to figure out some fiscal things? Yes, we do. But I’m the guy who is going to come and work with everyone and listen to everyone…. We’re going to continue to move forward.”

The Wall Street Journal:

The unions are blaming Inglewood’s shortfall on education cuts, but per-pupil spending is about the same as it was five years ago. The real problem (other than too generous benefits, which are an issue in most districts) is that enrollment has declined by more than 20% since 2006, which has shrunk the total pot of available money. Many of the city’s working class families have left. Meanwhile, about 10% of students have fled to charter schools–and for that the unions have only themselves to blame.
Seven charters have sprouted up within the last five years as alternatives to Inglewood’s failing schools, which are among the worst in the state. Only 30% of seventh graders meet state math standards while merely a quarter of 11th graders are proficient in English. The charters outperform traditional schools by 100 to 200 points on the state Academic Performance Index (which ranges from 200 to 1000). Most charters also operate at lower cost.
The district intends to float bonds to renovate facilities in order to draw back students, but energy efficient buildings and a spiffy, new athletic center won’t make up for a poor education. And they sure won’t help close the district’s $10 million structural deficit.

Matthew DiCarlo:

I have two points to make. The first is something that I think everyone knows: Educational outcomes, such as graduation and test scores, are signals of or proxies for the traits that lead to success in life, not the cause of that success.
For example, it is well-documented that high school graduates earn more, on average, than non-graduates. Thus, one often hears arguments that increasing graduation rates will drastically improve students’ future prospects, and the performance of the economy overall. Well, not exactly.
The piece of paper, of course, only goes so far. Rather, the benefits of graduation arise because graduates are more likely to possess the skills – including the critical non-cognitive sort – that make people good employees (and, on a highly related note, because employers know that, and use credentials to screen applicants).

Angela McManaman:

Bias alert: I love my kids’ Milwaukee Public School, La Escuela Fratney.
It’s a smaller school, K4 to grade 5, which means we’ll be playing the “where’re-the-kids-going-for-middle-school game” sooner than I’d like. But I’m a monolingual mom whose heart races every time I hear my 6- and 8-year-old speak beautifully accented Spanish. I appreciate their help when I fail to bridge the language gap at our neighborhood taqueria, and they can multiply in two languages. Neat.
Anyway, 2012 has been a big year for Fratney. Our longtime principal, Ms. Rita Tenorio, retired and Fratney was just named a GE Foundation Demonstration School. Alongside their peers across Wisconsin and in 45 other states, Fratney students, teachers and parents are adjusting to the Common Core State Standards for career and college preparation. In all this flurry of activity, some folks don’t even know about our new principal. Read below for the inside scoop on Ms. Llanas Buckman, ripped from the front page of the Fratney PTA newsletter!

Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity eNewsletter, via a kind Jeannie Bettner email:

Act 10, which Governor Walker designed to kill unions of public sector workers, caused massive protests in early 2011 because of it quashing peoples’ rights. And, that is the way Judge Colas saw it in ruling on MTI’s challenge to Act 10. Colas ruled that Act 10 violates the Constitutional rights of freedom of speech, freedom of association and equal protection of public sector union members (ruling did not address state employees). Enabled by Colas’ decision, MTI petitioned the Madison Metropolitan School District to commence negotiations over a Contract to succeed that which ends June 30, 2013.
Following Judge Colas’ order, both the City of Madison and Dane County negotiated new Contracts with their largest union, AFSCME Local 60. MTI, along with hundreds of supporters, pressed the MMSD to follow suit. After 37 hours of bargaining last Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, negotiators for MTI, SEE- MTI (clerical/technical employees), EA-MTI (educational assistants and nurse assistants), SSA-MTI (security assistants) and USO-MTI (substitute teachers) were successful in reaching terms for a new Contract through June 30, 2014.
The Union achieved the #1 priority expressed by members of MTI’s five bargaining units in the recent survey, protecting their Contract rights and benefits, and keeping their Union Contract. The “just cause” standard for any kind of discipline or dismissal is in tact, as is arbitration by a neutral third party of any such action by the District, and of all claims that District administration violated the terms of an MTI Contract. The Union was also successful in preserving salary and wage schedules (except for substitutes), as well as fringe benefits, another priority of members responding to MTI’s recent survey.
Solidarity was evident from the outset as, for the first time ever, representatives from all five (5) of MTI’s bargaining units worked together to bargain simultaneously. Representatives from the Custodial and Food Service units, represented by AFSCME Local 60, also lent support throughout the negotiations, even as they were rushing to bargain new contracts for their members. And, in a powerful display of solidarity, MTI’s Teacher Bargaining Team repeatedly put forth proposals enabling the District to increase health insurance contributions for teachers, if the District would agree NOT to increase contributions from their lower paid brothers and sisters in MTI’s EA, SEE and SSA bargaining units. Unfortunately, the District rebuffed the offers, insisting that all employees work under the cloud of uncertainty that employee health insurance contributions may be increased up to 10% of the premium after June 30, 2013.
The District entered the negotiations espousing “principles that put student learning in the forefront, with a respect for the fact that our employees are the people who directly or indirectly impact that learning”. MTI heard these concerns and made major accommodations in many contractual areas to address these needs. Areas where MTI accommodated the District’s stated need to attract staff who can close the achievement gap: 1) enable the District to place new hires anywhere on the salary schedule; 2) give new hires a signing bonus of any amount; 3) appoint new hires and non-District employees to any coaching or other extra duty position (annual District discretion of continuing extra duty position); 4) current staff to have no right to apply for vacancies occurring after June 15, to enable District to offer employment to outsiders; 5) enable the District to assign new hires to evening/weekend teaching positions; and 6) enable the District to hold two evening parent-teacher conferences per school year.
Yet, other District proposals appeared to have nothing to do with either student achievement or respecting the employees who make that happen. The District insisted on eliminating sick leave benefits for all substitute teachers hired after July 1, 2013. The District insisted on language which would non-renew the contracts of teachers on medical leave for more than two years. And the District’s numerous other “take backs”, unrelated to either of their stated principles, but just to take advantage of the leverage enabled by the uncertainty of Act 10. These concessions were received bitterly by the thousand who gathered at Wednesday’s MTI meeting, hoping for positive signs that the District’s messages of respect would be reflected in the settlement.
On the downside was the District’s attack on other Contract provisions. In violation of the principles they espoused to Walker’s then-proposed Act 10, in February 2011, Board members enabled District management to demand concessions from AFSCME and MTI in exchange for a new Contract. All seven Board members said of Act 10, “The Governor’s proposals are a damaging blow to all our public services and dedicated public employees. The legislation’s radical and punitive approach to the collective bargaining process seems likely to undermine our productive working relationship with our teachers and damage the work environment, to the ultimate detriment of student achievement.”
Interim Superintendent Jane Belmore espoused similar feelings just last month. In referring to Act 10, she wrote District employees “… we still need to determine together how to go forward in the best interest of our employees and our district.”
The pledges of Board members and Supt. Belmore were not worth the paper they were written on. Demanding significant changes and deletion of terms which they had agreed – some since the 1960’s – the District negotiators were relentless.

Links:

• Madison School Board approves new agreements with some union employees
• Is Teacher Union “Collective Bargaining” Good for Students?
• “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.”

“Getting Smart”:

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation awarded $100,000 today in a competition to develop innovative software to help teachers score student written responses to test questions. The prize was divided among five (5) teams. The competition compared the ability of software to score short-answer student essays in a way that was similar to human graders. The results showed that the software is not yet able to achieve the same scores as human graders.
“Giving school systems the tools to challenge students to develop critical reasoning skills is crucial to making those students competitive in the new century,” said Barbara Chow, Education Program Director at the Hewlett Foundation. “And critical reasoning is one of the capabilities, along with communicating clearly, working cooperatively, and learning independently, that we call Deeper Learning would like to see broadly embraced throughout the country.”
The Hewlett Foundation sponsored the Automated Student Assessment Prize (ASAP) to address the need for high quality standardized tests to replace many of the current ones, which test rote skills. The goal is to shift testing away from standardized bubble tests to tests that evaluate critical thinking, problem solving and other 21st century skills. To do so, it’s necessary to develop more sophisticated tests to evaluate these skills and reduce their cost so they can be adopted widely. Computer aided scoring can play an important role in achieving this goal.

Salman Khan:

In 1996, in a journal called the National Teaching & Learning Forum, two professors from Indiana University — Joan Middendorf and Alan Kalish — described how research on human attention and retention speaks against the value of long lectures. They cited a 1976 study that detailed the ebbs and flows of students’ focus during a typical class period. Breaking the session down minute-by-minute, the study’s authors determined that students needed a three- to five-minute period of settling down, which would be followed by 10 to 18 minutes of optimal focus. Then — no matter how good the teacher or how compelling the subject matter — there would come a lapse. In the vernacular, the students would “lose it.” Attention would eventually return, but in ever briefer packets, falling “to three- or four-minute [spurts] towards the end of a standard lecture,” according to the report. This study focused on college students, and of course it was done before the age of texting and tweeting; presumably, the attention spans of younger people today have become even shorter, or certainly more challenged by distractions.
Middendorf and Kalish also cited a study from 1985 which tested students on their recall of facts contained in a 20-minute presentation. While you might expect that recall of the final section of the presentation would be greatest– the part heard most recently — in fact the result was strikingly opposite. Students remembered far more of what they’d heard at the very beginning of the lecture. By the 15-minute mark, they’d mostly zoned out. Yet these findings — which were quite dramatic, consistent and conclusive, and have never yet been refuted — went largely unapplied in the real world.

Andy Smarick:

Eleven years ago I was a legislative assistant to a US Congressman, and K-12 was in my portfolio. NCLB was making its way through the House, and the congressman was leaning against. I took it upon myself to change his mind.
I gave him our state testing data showing enormous achievement gaps. This legislation, I argued, was social justice for disadvantaged kids. Standards, assessments, accountability, and transparency were not only reasonable but also necessary. We had to do something about failing schools. You have to vote for this legislation!
Ten years later I was Deputy Education Commissioner of New Jersey, and I was leading our effort to write a waiver to free our state from NCLB.
Were I interested in reputational self-protection, I’d take the easy way out and simply say that America learned a great deal over that decade; that I was right as a zealous 26-year old to agitate, and I was right as a wiser, more prudent 36-year old to retrench.
But that’s not how I feel. To this day, I’m deeply conflicted about the proper role of the federal government in our schools. As I alluded to yesterday, as a blogger, but more importantly, as a guy who’s done a good bit of education policy making and writing, I ought to have an answer. And I don’t.

Matthew DeFour:

The Madison School Board unanimously approved one-year collective bargaining agreements with some of its employees at noon Thursday, taking advantage of a legal window to change longstanding policies favored by the teachers union.
Additional agreements with the rest of its represented employees are expected to be approved at 6 p.m.
Whether the new agreements will stand depends on what happens to the state’s new collective bargaining law, known as Act 10. Dane County Circuit Court Judge Juan Colas ruled key portions of the law unconstitutional, but the state plans to appeal the decision.
School, city and county officials in Madison have quickly hammered out new agreements since Colas’ Sept. 14 ruling. The School District and Madison Teachers Inc. exchanged initial proposals Sunday and completed in three days a closed-door process that historically plays out over months.

Related: Is Teacher Union “Collective Bargaining” Good for Students?

Lauren Ipsum:

The second type of teaching is a form of compression, making things easier to understand. I don’t mean simply eliding details, or making your proofs more terse. I mean compression in the time it takes to explain an idea and its implications.
Computer science is hard. Logic is hard. And that’s fine. But if we leave this world as complicated as we found it then we’ve failed to do our jobs. Think about it this way: if the next generation learns at the same speed as yours, they won’t have time to move beyond you. Type II teaching is what enables Type I progress.
Physics went through a period of compression in the middle of the last century. Richard Feynman’s reputation wasn’t built on discovering new particles or laws of nature, but for discovering better ways to reason about what we already knew. [1] Mathematics has gone though several rebuilding periods. That’s why you can pick up a child’s math book today and find negative numbers, the square root of two, and many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse. Every one of those mundane ideas was once the hardest problem in the world. My word, people died in arguments over the Pythagorean Theorem. Now we teach it to kids in a half hour. If that’s not progress I don’t know what is.

Doug Tuthill:

Long-time Democratic education activist Jack Jennings, in a recent Huffington Post column, argued that Republican support for private school choice is a somewhat recent (i.e., the last 45 years) phenomenon, driven by a political desire to appeal to segregationists and weaken teacher unions. Jennings writes, “The Republicans’ talk about giving parents the right to choose is a politically expedient strategy … Just beneath the surface of the education rhetoric are political motivations to thwart integration, weaken the Democratic coalition, and cripple the teachers’ unions.”
Jennings is being disingenuous by not acknowledging that Democrats have also changed their position on public funding for private school choice over the years. Democrats George McGovern and Hubert Humphrey both ran for president on platforms supporting tuition tax credits for private schools, and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., was the U.S. Senate’s leading advocate for giving parents public funding to attend private schools. The Democratic Party reversed its support of public funding for private school choice in the late 1970s – as a political payback to the National Education Association for giving Jimmy Carter its first ever presidential endorsement.

Peter Coy:

The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate of any wealthy nation, with about 2.3 million people behind bars at any given moment. (That’s 730 out of 100,000, vs. just 154 for England and Wales.) There are more people in U.S. prisons than are in the country’s active-duty military. That much is well known. What’s less known is that people who are incarcerated are excluded from most surveys by U.S. statistical agencies. Since young, black men are disproportionately likely to be in jail or prison, the exclusion of penal institutions from the statistics makes the jobs situation of young, black men look better than it really is.
That’s the point of a new book, Invisible Men: Mass Incarceration and the Myth of Black Progress, by Becky Pettit, a professor of sociology at the University of Washington. Pettit spoke on Thursday in a telephone press conference.

Related: Robert Francis, the Texan judge closing America’s jails

Until recently, these people would have been discarded in overcrowded prisons. After all they were caught in Texas – the toughest state of a nation that locks up more offenders than any other in the world, with more than one in every 100 adults behind bars. Instead they receive counselling and assistance with housing and employment, although they can be sent back to jail if they fail drug tests, abscond or reoffend. One woman, a crystal meth addict, tells me the sessions in court are like walking on eggshells. But there are small incentives for those doing well, such as $10 gift vouchers or – on the day I visited – barbecue lunch out with Francis. “These people have to believe we care and want them to succeed,” he tells me later. “Once they believe in me they can start to change.”
They are beneficiaries of a revolution in justice sweeping the United States, one with illuminating lessons for Britain. It is a revolt led by hardline conservatives who have declared prison a sign of state failure. They say it is an inefficient use of taxpayers’ money when the same people, often damaged by drink, drugs, mental health problems or chaotic backgrounds, return there again and again.
Remarkably, this revolution was unleashed in “hang ’em high” Texas, which prides itself on its toughness and still holds more executions than other states. But instead of building more prisons and jailing ever more people, Texas is now diverting funds to sophisticated rehabilitation programmes to reduce recidivism. Money has been poured into probation, parole and specialist services for addicts, the mentally ill, women and veterans. And it has worked: figures show even violent crime dropping at more than twice the national average, while cutting costs and reducing prison populations.

Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school, here.

Express India:

Vidya is in a dilemma. The curriculum makes it mandatory for her to submit a project by the end of the term. After three years of engineering education, the final year student is struggling to make even a simple circuit work, let alone come up with a BE-level project.
Vidya need not worry, Pune’s vast ‘project-making’ industry promises to rescue students like her. ‘We make all kinds of engineering projects’ is a signboard found across the city and its outskirts, especially outside private engineering colleges. With private engineering colleges mushrooming across Maharashtra in the past decade, the project making industry has grown exponentially in the city.
Coming up with science projects is not so easy and requires a lot of research. They have to keep innovating and updating with technological advance in all fields to fulfill students’ demands.

Laura Waters:

Over the last week a remarkable story has unfolded in Camden, N.J. At the Camden City Public School Board’s most recent meeting on Tuesday, board members considered four applicants for N.J.’s newly-legislated Urban Hope Act and voted them all down.
The Urban Hope Act (pdf), signed by Gov. Chris Christie this past January, allows non-profits to build, manage, and operate up to four “renaissance” schools in three long-suffering school districts: Camden, Newark, and Trenton. Four organizations applied for Camden’s new Renaissance “district,” including one highly-regarded organization called KIPP, which runs some of Newark’s most successful charter schools. After six hours in closed session the Board members, in a move that surprised just about everyone (including the Camden mayor, who appointed them), rejected KIPP’s application by a split vote of 4-4, with one abstention.
This outcome is noteworthy on several levels, and the story itself elucidates one of the thorniest dilemmas that stump people who value public education. When faced with a chronically failing school system like Camden, should the priority be providing children with immediate relief from a district where the majority of the students never master basic academic skills? Or should the priority be lengthy efforts to rebuild the whole system? Does the urgency of the plight of current students trump long-term fixes, or is it the other way around?
This conundrum was put into sharp relief this week in Camden, especially in the context of some new documents up on Camden City Public Schools’ website. These reports are a brave and honest assessment of the district’s predicament. They also detail necessary corrective steps, some of which involve cultural and procedural changes which, by definition, will take years to implement.

Related: The Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy recently.

Sue Shellenbarger:

John Patriarche in Chandler, Ariz., logs on from home to check grades and assignments with his 13-year-old daughter, Anna.
Ever since her 12-year-old twin sons went back to school in August, Catherine Durkin Robinson has been telling herself, “Steer clear. Think first, and keep away,” she says.
The hazard she’s avoiding? Logging on to her school’s online grade-reporting system to see how her boys are doing. When she checked their grades online late last year, “I saw Cs and I almost lost my mind,” she says. Her sons’ teachers later explained that the grades weren’t up-to-date and that Zachary and Jacob were actually doing very well. But it was a shock she’d rather not repeat, says the Tampa, Fla.-based manager for a nonprofit education organization.

Karen Herzog:

A drop in the number of high school students and competition from for-profit and online universities are factors pinching enrollment at some University of Wisconsin System schools, forcing them to fine-tune their recruiting efforts.
The issue is expected to deepen in the next few years, and university leaders are bracing for the financial fallout if new recruitment and retention efforts don’t work.
“We’re entering into a trough we’ll come out of in several years,” UW System spokesman David Giroux said Tuesday, referring to a demographic shift in Wisconsin brought by declining birthrates that started 17 to 18 years ago. “We knew this was coming,” Giroux said.
The University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents will discuss the trend later this week during their regular meeting at UW-Stout.
At UW-Milwaukee, the focus is shifting to recruiting more international and graduate students, more out-of-state-students and continuing to improve retention of students already on campus, as freshman enrollments continue to decline from their peak in 2007.

Stephanie Simon:

Virtual public schools, which allow students to take all their classes online, have exploded in popularity across the United States, offering what supporters view as innovative and affordable alternatives to the conventional classroom.
Now a backlash is building among public officials and educators who question whether the cyber-schools are truly making the grade.
In Maine, New Jersey and North Carolina, officials have refused to allow new cyber-schools to open this year, citing concerns about poor academic performance, high rates of student turnover and funding models that appear to put private-sector profits ahead of student achievement.

Michael Horn:

I spent a few hours recently with the head of a brand new blended-learning school. The school is pushing the bounds of blended learning with a Flex model that is competency-based. Students move on when they have mastered the appropriate standards and skills, have individualized learning plans, and, along with their parents, receive daily progress reports based on how they are doing. The role of the teacher in this new school looks very different from that in a standard school.
Many parts of the schooling model are also still evolving as the school learns what does and does not work.
Uncertainty exists, and teachers are both teaching amidst the uncertainty and helping to create and refine the school model itself on the fly. Because new innovations rarely emerge fully baked and launch with perfect success, this is both natural and good.

Jeffrey Young:

n a summer day four years ago, a Stanford University computer-science professor named Andrew Ng held an unusual air show on a field near the campus. His fleet of small helicopter drones flew under computer control, piloted by artificial-intelligence software that could teach itself to fly after watching a human operator. By the end of the day, the copters were hot-dogging–flipping, rolling, even hovering upside down.
It was a milestone for the field of “machine learning,” the same area of artificial intelligence that lets Amazon recommend books based on a shopper’s previous habits and helps Google tailor search results to a user’s behavior. Mr. Ng and his team of graduate students showed that artificial-intelligence software could control one of the hardest-to-maneuver vehicles and keep it stable while flying at 45 miles an hour. That same year, Technology Review, published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, included Mr. Ng among the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35.
Today Mr. Ng is an innovator in an entirely different setting: online education. He is a founder of the start-up Coursera, which works with 33 colleges to help them deliver free online courses. After less than a year of operation, the company already claims more students–1.3 million–than just about any educational institution on the planet. Mr. Ng likes to say that Coursera arrived at an “inflection point” for the idea of massive open online courses, or MOOC’s, which are designed so a single professor can teach tens of thousands of students at a time.

Dan Walters:

There’s a tale behind the death of California’s proposed school funding allocation overhaul. The measure, Assembly Bill 18, was one of the casualties as Gov. Jerry Brown waded through hundreds of bills from the hectic, final hours of the 2012 legislative session. — Julia Brownley, D-Santa Monica, carried the bill, a watered-down version of her proposal to overhaul how the $60-plus billion in state, local and federal funds are allocated to California’s K-12 school districts each year.
She wanted to streamline state aid and shift more money to low-performing schools with large numbers of students who are poor or “English learners,” responding to criticism that the state was not focusing money on its most urgent needs.
The state Supreme Court four decades ago decreed the “equalization” of school finances, which were then rooted in property taxes.

Jen Wieczner:

If the government ran its student loan programs the way banks do, Ivy Leaguers would probably get a steep discount, those at state universities would pay a bit more, and many at community colleges and for-profit schools would be deemed subprime borrowers.
No college degree guarantees one will be able to afford to pay off their student loans, but Ivy League borrowers rarely default on their debt: Just 1% of Harvard University students defaulted within three years of their loans coming due in 2009, according to Department of Education data released last week; and at the higher end, just under 3% of Columbia University alumni defaulted. Compare that with for-profit schools such as the University of Phoenix, where 26% of students defaulted in that same time period — nearly twice the national average.

Room For Debate

Here’s a chilling thought: What if our English teachers were wrong? Maybe not about everything, but about a few memorable lessons. So many millions of writers have needlessly contorted their prose to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition. So many well-intentioned editors have fought to change “a historic” to “an historic.” If it turns out that the guidelines we cling to (“to which we cling”?) are nonsense, maybe the texters have the right idea when they throw out the old rules and start fresh.
But if you aren’t ready to give up — if the “flaunt” in that headline raised your blood pressure — then how can you tell the difference between a sound rule of English and a made-up shibboleth? Where do good rules come from, and how do bad ones catch on?

Karin Klein:

It’s hard to guess whether the topic of education will come up in this week’s presidential debate, or any of the others. With the economy and the whole 47% debacle on everybody’s mind, there hasn’t been much talk about the public schools, even though they’re at a critical juncture.
Of course, President Obama’s views are pretty clear because he’s been putting them into policy for the last few years. And in ways, those policies have been problematic. He’s obviously a big believer in giving the federal government a major role in education, which has traditionally been left to state and local governments in this country.
There are policies he can’t legally force on states, such as a common curriculum and rules about how they have to evaluate teachers. (He and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are insistent that scores on standardized tests have to be a “significant” part of teacher evaluations; it’s not bad policy to include them in some way, but there’s a real lack of research to show that they are absolutely key to rating teachers or will improve learning significantly.) So what the administration has done is twist states’ arms by making funding via such programs as Race to the Top conditional on meeting its vision of what education should look like, or, more recently, allowing waivers to states from the more onerous and nonsensical elements of the No Child Left Behind Act if they go along.

Larry Cuban:

One answer looks at how external testing, state academic standards, federal accountability regulations, teacher certification, and the unofficial national curriculum of Advanced Placement influence what teachers present. These largely unnoticed structures in the policy landscape set the boundaries within which teachers teach. To answer the above question on why teachers tilt toward “traditional” teaching, then, I also want to identify other factors that often go unmentioned by those eager to improve the teaching of history in K-12 schools.
Consider that cultural beliefs about the function of public schools to socialize children and youth into the dominant civic and social values (e.g., honesty, respect for others’ values, cooperating) are anchored in age-graded school structures. They become a powerful organizational mechanism for carrying out societal expectations (i.e., kindergarten prepares children for the first grade, a high school diploma is essential to going to college or getting a decent job). Teachers operating separately in their classrooms move 25 to 30-plus students through a 700-page history text, and give frequent tests to see whether students have learned the required knowledge and skills.

Isabel Sawhill & Ron Haskins:

Abstract: Good jobs in the nation’s twenty-first-century economy require advanced literacy skills such as categorizing, evaluating, and drawing conclusions from written texts. The adoption of the Common Core State Standards by nearly all the states, combined with tough literacy assessments that are now in the offing, will soon reveal that literacy skills of average students fall below international standards and that the gap in literacy skills between students from advantaged and disadvantaged families is huge. The authors offer a plan to help states develop and test programs that improve the quality of teaching, especially in high-poverty schools, and thereby both improve the literacy skills of average students and narrow the literacy gap.
U.S. schools are struggling to enable students, espe­cially those from poor families, to attain the advanced literacy skills required by the twenty-first-century American economy. One approach to enhancing schools’ efficacy in this area is improved educational standards. Standards are routine in American life. Sports have them; businesses have them; profes­sions have them. Standards are useful in clarifying the knowledge, skills, and competencies that society expects from individuals and organizations. Society also needs a way to determine whether the standards have been met, usually through testing, certification, licensing, or inspection systems. And a respected body of experts must be responsible for maintaining the integrity of the standards.

Maria Popova:

In the winter of 2010, inspired by Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules of writing published in The New York Times nearly a decade earlier, The Guardian reached out to some of today’s most celebrated authors and asked them to each offer his or her commandments. After Zadie Smith’s 10 rules of writing, here come 8 from the one and only Neil Gaiman:

Melanie Guzman, via a kind reader’s email

Philip V. Streich ’13, a Harvard student known for his exceptionally broad range of enthusiastic commitments, died in an accident Tuesday on his family’s farm near Platteville, Wis., Leverett House administrators wrote in an email Sunday.
At times an enthusiastic entrepreneur, a scientific prodigy, a political activist, a record producer, and a grandiose party host, Streich carved himself a Gatsby-esque role among the Class of 2013 during its first year at Harvard. Friends said Sunday that he will be remembered not only for his impressive accolades but also for serving as a socially unifying force for his freshman class.
“He was happiest at the center of anything,” said C. Tucker Pforzheimer ’13-’14, one of Streich’s freshman roommates.
At press time, information about the cause of Streich’s death was not available.

Richard Vedder:

There are two reasons why universities never “fail” in the sense that they cease to operate. First, of course, with governments paying part of the bill, the probability that revenue won’t cover expenses, leading to bankruptcy, is remote. If a school can manage to cover even only, say, 75 percent of its costs through tuition fees and other sources of revenue, it is likely that government will cover the rest — through operating and federal research grants; indirectly through federal student financial aid, which allows higher tuition fees; or through private donations and investment income enhanced by favorable tax status.
Universities don’t fail for another reason, as well: We don’t meaningfully define “success” or “failure” in higher education. Did Wesleyan University or Trinity College in Connecticut have a good year in 2011? Who knows? Did their students learn more than they did the year before, or develop better critical-thinking skills? Does the “value added” from an expensive education at those private schools exceed that at, say, the state-supported University of Connecticut, which is far less pricey?
It may well be that some schools are “failures” in a meaningful sense — their seniors know no more than their freshmen; their graduates are underemployed or have low-paying jobs; and they provide less student satisfaction per dollar spent than at comparable institutions — but we really don’t know that.

Julia Edwards:

Trachtenberg’s students funded this triumph. When he became president, they paid $25,000 (in today’s dollars) in tuition, room, and board to attend; by the time he retired, they paid $51,000. Trachtenberg made George Washington the most expensive school in the nation. The burst of cash powered his agenda, but the freshmen who borrowed to enroll–46 percent of the class–during his final year graduated with an average of $28,000 of debt.
Trachtenberg also set a trend that other colleges–first his private competitors, then universities across the country–felt compelled to follow. Today, George Washington is only the 21st most expensive school, and the average American student accumulates $24,300 of debt earning her diploma. Collectively, Americans hold more student-loan debt than credit-card debt, and graduates enter a world where more than half of them are jobless or underemployed.
A recession requires austerity, and Trachtenberg concedes that the charge-more/spend-more model cannot continue in today’s economy. “I don’t think the current model can go on,” he says, pointing out that schools can’t spend when their cash reserves run low.
But his misgivings go only so far. He still swears by the system he built, and he believes that the economy will improve to accommodate universities’ ambitions before schools have to scale back in response to the slowdown. If he has any regrets about his presidency, it is that he wishes he had pushed his board harder to spend more. “I would have been bolder,” Trachtenberg says. “I devoted too much time and energy worrying about a rainy day.”

Patrick Boehler:

At 7.15 every morning, Professor Wen Shuming and eight Chinese colleagues share a breakfast prepared by two local maids, who have been taught how to cater to the tastes of alien educators.
The group then leave their shared home and head for the office: two tube-shaped rooms with bare walls and fluorescent lights in a one-storey building on a busy road, next to a cash machine, a sportswear store and a deserted private school.
They are employed by Soochow University, but this office isn’t in Jiangsu province, nor even in China. It is on the outskirts of Vientiane, the capital of Laos.
Wen’s life is about to get a lot busier. After years of preparation and lobbying, the university campus he has been setting up will open its doors to undergraduate students in a couple of weeks. Little has been made of the undertaking, but as well as being Laos’ first foreign campus, it marks the first time a Chinese university (as opposed to the government-linked Confucius Institute) has opened a branch abroad.

Melody Gutierrez & Diana Lambert:

The Public Employment Relations Board found Rocklin Unified School District retaliated against four nurses and ordered the district to reinstate them with two years of back pay, plus 7 percent interest.
In a ruling released today, Administrative Law Judge Robin Wesley found Rocklin school district violated the Educational Employment Relations Act by laying off nurses Jennifer Hammond, Genevieve Sherman, Susan Firchau and Jennifer Bradley.
“We’ve always been very unhappy with what happened and we feel vindicated,” Hammond said today. “I’m ready and willing to take my job back.”
The Rocklin Teachers Professional Association filed an unfair practice charge against the school district in 2010, alleging the four nurses were laid off in retaliation for asking their union for assistance regarding workload and safety issues.