Zeit Online, via a kind Richard Askey email:

How do families live these days? OECD’s comprehensive world education ranking report, PISA 2009, was published in December of 2010. All participants of the test (fifteen-year-old pupils) completed a questionnaire about their living situation at home. ZEIT ONLINE analyzed and visualized this data to provide you with a unique way of comparing standards of living in different countries. Click on any icon to see further details.

Andrew Stevenson:

EVERY school teacher faces an annual performance review with education ministers set today to approve a national framework for assessments to begin next year.
The actual form of the review will be left to individual schools and school systems but the ministers will commit to begin the process of reviewing the work of the country’s 290,000 teachers.
Reviews will be led by the principal, a senior teacher or an outsider could be brought in. They are expected to include observation of classroom performance, student results and feedback from both parents and students.
The federal Education Minister, Peter Garrett, said the performance reviews were a ”genuinely big and important reform”.

Association of American Educators:

With the teaching profession growing and evolving, one theme that remains constant is the fact that effective teachers are the key to student success. Studies have shown that education schools are deeply in need of reform. From attracting top high school graduates, to improving the quality of instruction, institutions that prepare future teachers must be able to produce results. In order to bring our colleges of education into a new era of success, AAE is pleased to be joining the list of endorsers of the National Council on Teacher Quality’s (NCTQ) project to rank colleges of education in an effort to better prepare future educators.

The Advocate:

A deserved amount of controversy is generated by the state’s new vouchers for private school tuition, but it is not the only element of state law that changed this year. Significant changes are in store and new demands placed on traditional school systems by education bills championed by Gov. Bobby Jindal in this year’s Legislature.
Parts of the wide-ranging new laws — crammed together as Act 1 and Act 2 of the 2012 Legislature — affect the relationships between school boards and superintendents, giving the latter more untrammeled authority in hiring and firing. Other parts of the package include new alternative course work that might be available online for some students.
And amid all this is the looming implementation of a teacher evaluation system that could provide a significant amount of new work for principals and other supervisors of teachers, as well as paperwork demands. The state, for example, is working to assess whether computer capabilities in local systems are up to the task — for otherwise, the new demands could overwhelm the information technology that cash-strapped public schools can today afford.

Melissa Korn:

The best training ground for success in a male-dominated business world is a classroom full of women, says Cathy E. Minehan, dean of the all-female Simmons College School of Management.
In a coed environment, “male leadership roles remain unchallenged, and women are left with ‘play the game our way, or go home,'” she says.
Ms. Minehan, 65 years old, knows a thing or two about the old boys’ club. She is a former chief of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and spent nearly 40 years at central bank branches in Boston and New York. She stepped down in 2007, then took the deanship at the Boston-based school last summer, joking that she “flunked” retirement.

The Montgomery Business Journal, via a kind reader’s email:

The Grundels’ success story is exactly what Montgomery Public Schools Superintendent Barbara Thompson [bing blekko clusty google] wants to hear. She wants all the district’s nearly 32,000 students to achieve, succeed and enjoy learning.
This fall, the district will launch its International Baccalaureate program and will offer a career technical education program along with seven Career Academies; a growing magnet program for both the arts and academics; and an Advanced Placement (AP) program that continues to expand at a tremendous pace.
“It is a unique pathway for our students having all those programs,” Thompson said. “It means that your child can come into this school district and be challenged at any level. Some of those pathways are going to lead to a four-year college; some will lead to a two-year college; some will lead you right into the world of work. It’s giving students those career pathways that really fit with their strength area.”
Now, you begin to see what all those pieces mean and what the big picture is. “The master plan is to bring our traditional schools up to the level of the magnets,” Thompson said. “That really is the ultimate goal in terms of what we are doing with our rigor and expectations. That is the end game.”
“These are all steps to get us there. I think kids need deliberate steps to get from places, which is why you have the pre-AP program offered at middle school because they can’t just jump into AP in high school.
“It’s why you have the Career Exploratory at middle school because once again you want to go into the Career Academies or career tech. We are making sure that every child takes the explorer test in eighth grade and that goes over their aptitude and skills so when they reach high school they are supposedly doing a four-year plan. That’s every student.”
And the programs that the superintendent has implemented the past few years as well as expanding existing ones, support, encourage and excite targeted groups of students – all students.
The programs on the surface may appear to be disjointed – what does a pre-K program have in common with an Overage Academy – but the common thread is making sure the students succeed.
The pre-K program was expanded from six to 23 programs and turned the closed McKee Elementary School into a pre-K center. Those programs may be cut to 21 because of funding.
That’s the youngest targeted group. Here’s what the district has done for other groups of students:

• Increased graduation rates, although with the state’s new method of computing graduation rates – those numbers are likely to fall as will graduation rates across the state.
• Created a sixth-grade academy to help elementary school students make the transition to middle school.
• Created a ninth-grade academy to help middle school students make the transition to high school.
• Created an Overage Academy to help struggling ninth-graders who are two or more years older than the usual students further advance in their schooling.
• Created a Credit and Grade Recovery program to provide more one-on-one teacher assistance so the students will be able to graduate – and hundreds have.
• Launched an academic magnet program at Johnnie Carr Middle School.
• Reconfigured nearly all the middle schools for grades six through eight.
• Instituted a school-wide dress code.
• Placed a pre-AP program in middle schools.
• Placed a career tech program in middle schools.
• Will launch a Mandarin Chinese program with Auburn University Montgomery that will be at the new eastside high school (in fall 2013) as well as Carr and MacMillan International Academy.
• Consolidated the district by closing some schools and using others in a different way.
• Will bring at least 15 highly qualified Teach for America teachers to the district in the fall – and they usually stay for two years.
• Has begun the process for system-wide accreditation.
• Cut $37 million from the budget over three years and turned a $2.5 million deficit into a surplus of nearly $8 million.

“It really is a puzzle and you are trying to put it together so you create this environment where learning is really exciting for students,” Thompson said. “We are trying to meet those needs of all of our students.
“When I first came here, I gave you the three Rs: relevance, rigor and relationships. All of these programs fall under that category.”
You can imagine, a system with nearly 32,000 students has a lot of needs and you can imagine that Montgomery County’s third-largest employer – about 4,500 people – has a lot of needs. Tom Salter, senior communications officer for MPS, likes to point out that if you combine the students and employees, the school district would be the 13th-largest city in the state. “With that many folks compared to a single, private school that has a hand-picked 600 or 700 in it – it’s different, but it’s not necessarily better to be in a private school.”

“relevance, rigor and relationships” – well said.
Alabama participated in the 2011 TIMSS global exam along with Minnesota and Massachusetts. Wisconsin has never benchmarked our students via the global exams. We have been stuck with the oft-criticized WKCE.
The Montgomery, Alabama schools spent $283,633,475 for 31,470 students ($9,012.82/student) while Madison spent 39% more, or $14,858 per student. The 2011-2012 budget was roughly $369,394,753 for 24,861 students.

International News:

Ram Singh, 17, earns just one dollar from the 100 cups of tea he makes every day outside Delhi railway station, but each evening, after packing up, he goes to the bank and deposits nearly half of it.
Singh holds an account at a special bank, run for — and mostly by — Indian street children, that keeps what little money they have safe and seeks to instill the idea that savings, however meagre, are important.
Just one among millions of street children who rely on menial jobs for survival, Singh is determined to make his work pay some sort of future dividend.
“I’m smart, but that alone isn’t enough to start a business.

The Economist:

WITH its leafy avenues and Gothic buildings, the University of Chicago seems a sober, solid sort of place. John D. Rockefeller, whose money built it, said it was the “best investment I ever made”. Yet Chicago and other not-for-profit American universities have been piling on the debt as if they were high-tech start-ups.
Long-term debt at not-for-profit universities in America has been growing at 12% a year, estimate Bain & Company, a consultancy, and Sterling Partners, a private-equity firm (see chart 1). A new report looked at the balance-sheets and cashflow statements of 1,692 universities and colleges between 2006 and 2010, and found that one-third were significantly weaker than they had been several years previously.
A crisis in higher education has been brewing for years. Universities have been spending like students in a bar who think a Rockefeller will pick up the tab. In the past two years the University of Chicago has built a spiffy new library (where the books are cleverly retrieved by robots), a new arts centre and a ten-storey hospital building. It has also opened a new campus in Beijing.

Dave Murray:

For individual school and district data, visit www.MISchoolData.org and click on Dashboard & School Report Card button located on the left.
The changes were praised by an education advocacy group, with leaders saying that the problems of low-scoring students were for years masked by the high-achievers in some districts. Communities that have long prided themselves on their school systems are now left to ponder stark disparities, said Amber Arellano, executive director of the Education Trust-Midwest.
New this year is a designation based in part on the gap between the highest-scoring 30 percent of students and the lowest-performing 30 percent – a measure that landed some high-achieving schools in affluent areas in a new, “focus school” category. The 10 percent of the schools with the widest gaps are added to the group.

Colson Whitehead:

The art of writing can be reduced to a few simple rules. I share them with you now.
Rule No. 1: Show and Tell. Most people say, “Show, don’t tell,” but I stand by Show and Tell, because when writers put their work out into the world, they’re like kids bringing their broken unicorns and chewed-up teddy bears into class in the sad hope that someone else will love them as much as they do. “And what do you have for us today, Marcy?” “A penetrating psychological study of a young med student who receives disturbing news from a former lover.” “How marvelous! Timmy, what are you holding there?” “It’s a Calvinoesque romp through an unnamed metropolis much like New York, narrated by an armadillo.” “Such imagination!” Show and Tell, followed by a good nap.

Steve Colowich:

Online education not only gave nontraditional students a chance to enroll in collegiate programs from afar; it has also given universities that historically have not enjoyed the prestige of the Ivies a chance to build a reputation on fresh territory and build reliable revenue streams.
But, now that higher education’s traditional heavyweights are creating online courses and offering them for free to anyone who wants to register, those universities that have made names for themselves in the market for “conventional” online programs are trying to sort out how these high-profile “MOOCs” (i.e., Massive Open Online Courses) could affect their own positions in an online market where many have staked their futures.
One strategy for established online players would put them in the somewhat ironic role of making sure students who have passed Harvard-level exams deserve college credit.

The Wall Street Journal:

Some 90,000 Hong Kong citizens, many of them parents accompanied by small children, marched in blazing heat Sunday to oppose a government plan to teach respect for one-party rule in all government-funded schools. So far the administration of newly inaugurated Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying refuses to back down. Officials in Beijing insist the courses go ahead, a serious violation of Hong Kong’s autonomy and a move that could alienate Hong Kong from the motherland.
Chinese President Hu Jintao called for “more emphasis on national education” in 2007, and the territory’s government has paid lip service to the idea. But concrete plans only got underway in the last two years. The sudden urgency is clearly related to the passage of political reforms in 2010 that allow for elections by universal suffrage for the Chief Executive in 2017 and Legislative Council in 2020.

Ashley Gebb:

The future of education and its role in economic development will be featured in a town hall meeting on Saturday hosted by the Yuba City Unified School District.
As part of the review and discussion of the district’s strategic plan, officials want feedback on what residents value about students’ preparation for the future and workforce, and how to prioritize the budget to achieve those goals. With a $100 million budget and as one of the largest employers in Yuba-Sutter, the district wants to ensure it can continue to provide quality education with its dwindling resources, said Superintendent Nancy Aaberg.
“It’s about keeping our students competitive and the community competitive,” she said.

Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:

A few weeks ago, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) released an example of what the upcoming report cards for state schools will look like. The report cards are described as one of the package of reforms that that DPI promised to implement in order to win a waiver from the federal Department of Education from the more onerous burdens of the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act.
One of the qualifications for an NCLB waiver is that a state must put into place an accountability system for schools. The system must take into account results for all students and subgroups of students identified in NCLB on: measures of student achievement in at least reading/language arts and mathematics; graduation rates; and school performance and progress over time. Once a state has adopted a “high-quality assessment,” the system must also take into account student growth.
In announcing the NCLB waiver, DPI claimed that it had established accountability measures that “1) are fair; 2) raise expectations; and 3) provide meaningful measures to inform differentiated recognitions, intervention, and support.”
Designing a fair and meaningful system for assessing the performance of the state’s schools is a worthy endeavor. The emphasis for me is on the “fair” requirement. I consider an assessment system to be fair if it measures how successfully a school promotes the learning of whichever students show up at its door.

Related: Notes and links on the oft-criticized WKCE and Madison’s long term reading recovery challenges.

The Economist:

The Credo study has been criticised for not comparing the results of children who have won charter-school lotteries with those who have not–a natural experiment in which the only difference between winners and losers should be the schooling they receive. Such studies suggest that charters are better. For example, a lottery study in New York City found that by eighth grade (around 13), charter-school pupils were 30 points ahead in maths.
However, recent work by Mathematica, an independent policy group, suggests that the Credo study is sound. The bigger problem is that its findings have been misinterpreted. First, the children who most need charters have been served well. Credo finds that students in poverty and English language learners fare better in charters. And a national “meta-analysis” of research, done last year for the Centre on Reinventing Public Education in Seattle, found charters were better at teaching elementary-school reading and mathematics, and middle-school mathematics. High-school charters, though, fared worse. Another recent study in Massachusetts for the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded that urban charter schools are shown to be effective for minorities, poor students and low achievers.

Evelyn Lamb:

In an opinion piece for the New York Times on Sunday, political science professor Andrew Hacker asks, “Is Algebra Necessary?” and answers, “No.” It’s not just algebra: geometry and calculus are on the chopping block, too. It’s not that he doesn’t think math is important; he wants the traditional sequence to be replaced by a general “quantitative skills” class, and perhaps some statistics.
Quite a few people have responded to Hacker’s column already. I highly recommend these posts by Rob Knop, Daniel Willingham, and RiShawn Biddle.
There are so many problems with Hacker’s essay that it’s hard to know where to start. Hacker’s first main point is that math is difficult, and the poor grades that result prevent too many people from graduating high school or college. His second is that the math we learn is not the math we need in our jobs.

Anjali Hazari:

A reader recently told me about her neighbour’s daughter, who is in grade six at an international school.
One day the girl’s maths teacher asked students if they attended the Kumon or Enopi programmes after school. Most did, but all the teacher did was to tell the others they would have to catch up. The reader was rightly appalled.
Research by University of Hong Kong Professor Mark Bray on students’ increasing reliance on tuition in Asia has energised the debate on whether tutorial schools are a necessary evil.
In my experience, parents are too quick to send their children to tutors. Their reasons for doing so vary. For some parents, it’s because their child’s friends are tutored; others feel they are depriving their children of the chance to succeed if they don’t receive tutoring. Some parents do it out of guilt because they are unable to personally supervise the children’s progress.

Private Supplementary Tutoring and Its Implications for Policy Makers in Asia.

Alan Jacobs:

E-readers have been around long enough now that the novelty has largely worn off. To be sure, we still get the occasional article or blog post celebrating the smell of “real books” and denouncing the disembodied fakery of text on a screen, but not nearly as many as in recent years. E-readers are simply part of the reading landscape now — the first Kindle was released almost five years ago — and it’s time for a midterm progress report. How is the technology developing? What has been accomplished and what remains to be done?
One good development in the past five years: more options for reading at night. There are backlit LCD reading possibilities via the iPad and subsequent tablets, including the Kindle Fire and the Nexus 7, plus a much less eye-frying option, the e-ink Nook Simple Touch GlowLight. The Kindle software for the iPad and iPhone allows you to dim the screen for that app only, which is helpful — and I think it’s great to be reading as the sky grows darker and not have to get up to turn on a light, remaining focused on the book — but my eyes just hurt after a long iPad session. I don’t know that anything can be done about that.

Katie Rophie:

1. You are not a helicopter parent if your kid is not in a zillion extracurriculars. In the recent clamor on the subject of whether this generation of parents is hovering too much and oversteering, overmanaging, and otherwise spoiling their children, I’ve heard parents say, “But we don’t know any actual helicopter parents.” They say this because they don’t know anyone who fits the obvious caricatures–that is anyone who schedules Mandarin classes for their 5-year-old and dutifully shuttles them off every Saturday morning for theater-to-express-yourself classes. But the overabundance of extracurriculars is only one small part of the larger, disturbing phenomenon Madeline Levine chronicles in her voice-of-reason-ish new book, Teach Your Children Well, which was excellently reviewed this weekend in the New York Times by Judith Warner.

Frank Ching:

The Basic Law stipulates that the Hong Kong government shall “on its own, formulate policies on the development and improvement of education”. Yet the idea of national education, which is arousing such controversy, was evidently conceived not by the government here. It was proposed in Beijing by President Hu Jintao .
At a dinner on June 30, 2007, the president suggested to Donald Tsang Yam-kuen, who was to be sworn in as chief executive the following day, that Hong Kong “should put more emphasis on national education for the youth”.

Room for Debate:

More than half the states have now been excused from important conditions of the No Child Left Behind education law. They’ve been allowed to create new measures of how much students have improved and how well they are prepared for college or careers, and to assess teacher performance on that basis. Teachers will be evaluated in part on how well their students perform on standardized tests. One study, though, found that some state plans could weaken accountability.

Matthew DeFour:

Madison School Board member Mary Burke spent more than $128,000 on her spring campaign — all of it her own — surpassing by far the most spent in recent city school board elections, according to available data.
Since 2001, the earliest online city clerk records are available, the most spent on a Madison School Board campaign was $28,349 by Marj Passman in 2007, when she lost to Maya Cole. That amount also was surpassed this year by incumbent Arlene Silveira, who reported spending $36,530.
Burke, a former state Commerce secretary and Trek Bicycle executive, said she made most of the expenditures, mostly for marketing and advertising, after the local teachers union, Madison Teachers Inc., backed her opponent, firefighter Michael Flores.

The Economist:

Yet the virtue of experiments is that you can learn from them; and it is now becoming clear how and where charter schools work best. Poor pupils, those in urban environments and English-language learners fare better in charters (see article). In states that monitor them carefully and close down failing schools quickly, they work best. And one great advantage is that partly because most are free of union control, they can be closed down more easily if they are failing.
This revolution is now spreading round the world. In Britain academies, also free from local-authority control, were pioneered by the last Labour government. At first they were restricted to inner-city areas where existing schools had failed. But the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition has turbocharged their growth, and has launched “free schools”, modelled on a successful Swedish experiment, which have even more independence. By the end of this year half of all British schools will be academies or free schools. Free schools are too new for their performance to be judged; in academies, though, results for GCSEs (the exams pupils take at 15 or 16) are improving twice as fast as those in the state sector as a whole.

TED Talks:

Aged 16 and 14 respectively, Boushra and Line are homeschooling enthusiasts. Largely self-taught, they collectively speak Arabic, English, Chinese, German, Italian and French

Jesse Pollack:

I’m Jesse Pollak, a student at Pomona College. This summer, I was lucky enough to participate in the hackNY fellows program. If you don’t already know, hackNY is a non-profit organization whose mission is to “to federate the next generation of hackers for the New York innovation community.” In addition to holding twice annual student hackathons, each summer hackNY organizes the hackNY fellows program:
“a program that pairs quantitative and computational students with startups which can demonstrate a strong mentoring environment: a problem for a student to work on, a person to mentor them, and a place for them to work. Students enjoy free housing together and a pedagogical lecture series to introduce them to the ins and outs of joining and founding a startup.”

Heidi Grant Halvorson:

Quick: Think of a successful person. Someone who is really good at what they do.
Now, in a word or phrase, tell me why that person has been so successful. What makes them so good?
Obviously, I can’t hear your answer. But I’d be willing to wager that it had something to do with innate ability.
“He’s so brilliant.”
“She’s a genius.”
“He’s a natural leader.”
These are the kinds of answers people — particularly Americans — tend to give when you ask them why certain individuals have enjoyed so much success.

Campbell Brown:

By resisting almost any change aimed at improving our public schools, teachers unions have become a ripe target for reformers across the ideological spectrum. Even Hollywood, famously sympathetic to organized labor, has turned on unions with the documentary “Waiting for ‘Superman'” (2010) and a feature film, “Won’t Back Down,” to be released later this year. But perhaps most damaging to the unions’ credibility is their position on sexual misconduct involving teachers and students in New York schools, which is even causing union members to begin to lose faith.
In the last five years in New York City, 97 tenured teachers or school employees have been charged by the Department of Education with sexual misconduct. Among the charges substantiated by the city’s special commissioner of investigation–that is, found to have sufficient merit that an arbitrator’s full examination was justified–in the 2011-12 school year:

• An assistant principal at a Brooklyn high school made explicit sexual remarks to three different girls, including asking one of them if she would perform oral sex on him.

Jordan Weissmann:

If you’re a parent, and you don’t suffer palpitations whenever the topic of paying for college comes up, congratulations: You’re either unusually mellow, or unusually wealthy. Higher education is expensive, and getting more so by the year.
But how expensive? Ah, that’s a trickier question. What we talk about when we talk about the price of a degree can be a bit murky, thanks to the vast variations in tuition, financial aid, and lifestyle choices that determine how much a student spends during their time on campus. For parents paying the tab, and for wonks who’d like to make higher education more affordable, it’s useful to have a realistic baseline for how much a bachelor’s actually runs these days.
So without further ado, let’s look at the numbers.

Ellen Knickmeyer:

Dressed in caps and gowns, the college students packing a graduation ceremony in suburban Washington, D.C., acted like excited graduates anywhere in the United States.
Except, perhaps, when the men broke into tribal line dances. Or when the women, wearing headscarves, burst forth with zagareet, soaring trills of their tongues, in celebration.
The more than 300 graduates gathered at a hotel overlooking the Potomac River were all from Saudi Arabia, part of a massive government-paid foreign study program to earn bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees and return home to help run their country.

Larisa:

It has recently been suggested that, in order to elevate the quality and status of teachers in America, teachers need to take a “bar exam.” After all, doctors and lawyers have serious hurdles to jump over in order to secure and maintain their licenses. The work that you do as a teacher is just as important as the work that a doctor or a lawyer does–in fact you educate future doctors and lawyers. Why shouldn’t teachers be held to the same standard as lawyers and doctors?
Being an effective teacher requires more than just attending professional development workshops. Excellent instruction in the classroom facilitates student learning, which leads to better achievement on formal assessments and standardized tests. Starting the discussion with disappointing test results, however, often brings up the “chicken or the egg” dilemma: is poor performance on standardized tests the fault of the teacher for not providing quality instruction or is it the fault of the student for failing to work hard and learn? Frequently, teachers are shouldering the blame.

Stephanie Banchero:

The Tennessee State Board of Education has cleared the way for a charter school backed by neighborhood parents to open in middle-class West Nashville.
The board voted Friday to direct the Metro Nashville Public Schools to approve an application by Great Hearts Academies, a nonprofit that operates prep-school-like charter schools in the Phoenix area, to open a school in 2014. The group hopes to open four more schools across Nashville after that.
The Nashville school board, whose members are elected on a nonpartisan basis, approved two other charter schools last month. But it twice rejected Great Hearts’ application, claiming the school would recruit only affluent students and harm diversity efforts in the district, where 45% of elementary students passed state reading exams last year, and 33% passed math. The local teachers union didn’t take a public stand on the application.

Nashville schools spent $674,034,800 [PDF] to educate 79,117 students [District Fact Sheet PDF, 71% “economically disadvantaged”] during the 2011-2012 school year ($8519.47/student), 42% less than Madison’s $14,858.

rknop:

Yes, I admit, the editorial at the New York Time entitled “Is Algebra Necessary?” pushes my buttons. Hacker makes some valid and relevant points, and I’ll get back to that. However, the core of his argument is the ultimate in anti-intellectualism. What’s worse, it’s the kind of anti-intellectualism that you get from intellectuals, the sort of thing that sprouts from those on the math-ignorant side of the “two cultures” identified by C. P. Snow.
Andrew Hacker’s argument against making algebra necessary for high school and college students is essentially: Math Is Hard. Having to do it gets in the way of people who could be amazing at other things, because they will drop out of high school because Math Is Hard. So, rather than stop them from achieving all that they might achieve, we should just remove algebra from the high school curriculum. He points out that failing math is one of the main reasons students leave school. Now, I might think that this is a reason to look at our educational culture, at how math is taught, at the fact that it is somehow deemed acceptable and indeed normal to find basic math impenetrable. But, if you’re on the other side of the two cultures, evidently this means that we as a society should just give up on the general teaching of basic algebra. Evidently, it’s OK that the elites who understand the simplest things about science become that much more separated from the general educated public, and that the generally educated public know that much less about them.

Gowers Blog:

As I said would happen in my post about a possible approach to teaching maths to non-mathematicians aged 16-18, I went last Wednesday to Watford Grammar School for Boys to try the approach out. The headmaster there, Martin Post, was remarkably helpful and assembled a usefully varied group of pupils, some from his school, some from the equivalent school for girls, and some from a nearby mixed comprehensive school (I wasn’t told which one) whose pupils receive some of their teaching in scientific subjects from Watford Grammar School. What’s more, some of the people there were doing maths and further maths, some were doing just maths, and some were not doing either. The one thing that was not representative about the group was that they were much brighter than average: for example, the non-mathematicians there had been chosen by their teachers as clever people who could have done maths but decided that they were more interested in other things. For most of the rest of this post, I’ll say what questions I discussed and how the discussions went. All but two of them were taken from the list in the earlier post.

Elizabeth Malm:

Here is how it works. Each year, a student (or more likely, their family) fills out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). In this cumbersome, complicated process, families report income and other related assets. Essentially, this reports to the government the family’s estimated ability to pay for higher education–not willingness to pay, but ability to pay. This is an important point. The government then calculates what is known as the “expected family contribution,” which is sent to colleges, reporting what exactly the government deems a family can devote to their student’s education.
Let’s step back for a moment and frame this problem a little differently. Imagine you are on the market to purchase a new car. When a salesman approaches, you (the buyer) have an information advantage. You know exactly what you are willing to pay for the car based on your own personal preferences and your personal belief as to how much of your family budget you can realistically devote to purchasing the car. With this knowledge, you are in the driver’s seat on negotiating the price of the car.

Mike Hastens:

After the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education approved state Superintendent John C. White’s version of accountability for voucher schools this week, some people were asking “what accountability?”
They especially feel that way since White reserved the right to waive any and all restrictions imposed in the accountability plan if he believes it’s merited.
If a school doesn’t have 40 students, there are no repercussions, even if every voucher student fails the state assessment tests.

David O’Brien, Urs Gasser, and John Palfrey:

This briefing document was developed with helpful inputs from industry stakeholders and other practitioners in preparation for the “E-Books in Libraries” workshop, hosted on February 24, 2012, by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society with the generous support of the Charles H. Revson Foundation.
The “E-Books in Libraries” workshop was convened as part of a broader effort to explore current issues associated with digital publishing business models and access to digitally-published materials in libraries. Workshop attendees, including representatives from leading publishers, libraries, academia, and other industry experts, were invited to identify key challenges, share experiences, and prioritize areas for action. This document, which contains some updates reflecting new developments following the February workshop (up to June 2012), is intended to build on and continue that discussion with a broader audience, and encourage the development of next steps and concrete solutions.

rogue Lynn:

First time I heard about raspberry pi was through twitter. I thought: Oh I bet that’s a cute name for a new python module. Didn’t look into it.
Then I overheard a very dedicated PyLady saying “OMG my Raspberry Pi shipped today!”
Wait, a module shipped? She doesn’t develop python modules. Is this a physical thing?
Then, weeks later, I asked another friend, “What is this Raspberry Pi?”
The world stopped to him. “What, are you serious?” he responded. “Yeah…?” Clearly I wasn’t getting “it.” Then I preceded to get educated in “it.”

GE Citizenship:

Dr. Sabrina Hope King is Chief Academic Officer for the New York Department of Education’s Office of Curriculum and Professional Development. As part of her role, she leads the Campaign for Middle School Success, a multi-year strategic plan to develop a culture of success in schools throughout the city and improve the academic performance of middle school students.
The Campaign for Middle School Success is a $35 million initiative supported by both public and private funds, including a five-year, $17.9 million grant from the GE Foundation as part of the Developing Futures™ in Education program.
Dr. King’s audio perspective discusses how New York City schools are addressing the achievement gap and creating a system of middle schools that help prepare children for success in further education and future careers.

Quinn Cummings:

I don’t know how most people spend their second morning home schooling. I spent mine hyperventilating into a paper bag. After less than 24 hours of educating my child at home, I was struck by the realization that I wasn’t up to the task and should move immediately to Plan B. Except I didn’t have a Plan B.
For two years leading up to this I had watched my daughter convince experienced, well-meaning teachers that she was incapable of mastering long division when, in fact, she simply didn’t like long division. Alice’s ploy raised a larger concern: At age 9, she appeared to be cruising along in school without actually doing any work. To my sorrow, it appeared I had given birth to myself, another pleasant slacker fated to a lifetime of successfully studying for midterms between classes until barely paying attention stopped working. Alice wasn’t learning how to learn, she was learning how to coast. Maybe I could wait and see if she came to learning on her own. Or maybe she needed a different kind of education.
Her father and I checked out a few middle-school programs known for their rigor. Each promised to challenge Alice academically but also promised hours of homework every night. I’m greedy. I want my child challenged, but I don’t want her staying up until 2 a.m. every night translating “The Aeneid.” I knew we had a small window of opportunity to teach Alice to love learning, but I also knew there was an equally small window for her to be a child. Her academic options seemed to lie on either side of a wide chasm: a fluffy pillow on one side, a jackhammer on the other. I tried home schooling because I couldn’t find a better alternative.

By Angela Harrison:

England’s new academy schools can now hire unqualified teachers, after a change to the rules.
Government officials say this means academies will be free to hire “great linguists, computer scientists and other specialists who have not worked in state schools before”.
Unions for head teachers and teachers have attacked the move, describing it as a damaging backward step.
The change is immediate.
Until now, most state-funded schools could only employ people with what is known as “Qualified Teacher Status (QTS)“, meaning they have been trained and approved as meeting a range of standards.
Independent schools are exempt.
The change also brings academies in line with the new free schools, which are already free to employ people without QTS.

Related: An Email to Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad on Math Teacher Hiring Criteria.

Jennifer Cheng and Dennis Chong:

The subject is intended to engender national pride but is derided as a “brainwashing” tool by critics.
A representative of the central government’s liaison office waded into the furore, urging parents to back the curriculum.
While Ng claimed there had been no “falling out”, leaders of the National Education Parents Concern Group said they walked out of the talks and felt “disrespected” by Ng.
Convener Eva Chan Sik-chee said the talks were like “playing music to a bull” and called for more parents to join the march, due to start at 2.30pm in Victoria Park and end at government headquarters in Admiralty.
Chan said the talks were no more than a gesture, intended to “turn down the heat” before the protest.

Jeffrey Young:

Coursera has been operating for only a few months, but the company has already persuaded some of the world’s best-known universities to offer free courses through its online platform. Colleges that usually move at a glacial pace are rushing into deals with the upstart company. But what exactly have they signed up for? And if the courses are free, how will the company–and the universities involved–make money to sustain them?
Some clues can be found in the contract the institutions signed. The Chronicle obtained the agreement between Coursera and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the first public university to make such a deal, under a Freedom of Information Act request, and Coursera officials say that the arrangement is similar to those with the other partners.
The contract reveals that even Coursera isn’t yet sure how it will bring in revenue. A section at the end of the agreement, titled “Possible Company Monetization Strategies,” lists eight potential business models, including having companies sponsor courses. That means students taking a free course from Stanford University may eventually be barraged by banner ads or promotional messages. But the universities have the opportunity to veto any revenue-generating idea on a course-by-course basis, so very little is set in stone.

Joel Klein:

During the eight years I served as chancellor of New York City’s public schools, the naysayers and the apologists for the status quo kept telling me “we’ll never fix education in America until we fix poverty.”
I always thought they had it backward, that “we’ll never fix poverty until we fix education.” Let me be clear. Poverty matters: Its debilitating psychological and physical effects often make it much harder to successfully educate kids who grow up in challenged environments. And we should do everything we can to ameliorate the effects of poverty by giving kids and families the support they need. But that said, I remain convinced that the best cure for poverty is a good education.
And I’m equally convinced that pointing to poverty as an excuse for why we fail to properly educate poor kids only serves to condemn more of them to lives of poverty.

Ed Moore:

The use of the phrase “global marketplace” has become so commonplace it is almost trite.
It has developed into one of those catch phrases that fill the hours of talking heads and appear in virtually every paper issued on the American economy.
Americans like to think of our country as an undefeated champion, capable of conquering every challenge. Yet, we find ourselves in an increasingly competitive universe of economies, all seeking to become economic giants; all working hard to become leaders across the spectrum of competitive fields.
In “Benchmarking for Success: Ensuring U.S. Students Receive a World Class Education,” published by the National Governors Association (NGA), the plea was made clear: “what matters is how a state’s students compare to those in countries around the globe. America must seize this moment to ensure that we have workers whose knowledge, skills and talents are competitive with the rest of the world.”

Related: www.wisconsin2.org

Sean Kennedy:

Charter schools, only 20 years old, are on the rise across America as parents and students try to escape failing public schools. The growth in charter schools has hit Catholic schools especially hard, as education historian Diane Ravitch noted, “Where charter schools are expanding, Catholic schools are dying.” Instead of fearing the rise of Charter schools, Catholic schools should learn from their innovative practices.
Parents who once preferred Catholic schools to the failing public system are abandoning Catholic schools en masse. This coming school year (2012-2013), more American elementary and secondary school students will enroll in charter schools than Catholic schools for the first time.
Charters have grown precisely because they took some of the best practices of Catholic schools – uniforms, discipline and high expectations – and applied them zealously. Now, Catholic schools should adopt some of the best practices used by charters to stage a comeback.
Milwaukee’s Catholic schools have a special opportunity to lead reform. Starting in the fall of 2013, one of the most innovative charter school networks, Rocketship Academy of San Jose, Calif., will open its first franchise in Milwaukee.
Rocketship plans to open eight in total and enroll 4,000 students in the coming years. Rocketship’s model has improved student outcomes dramatically, especially for English language learners. More important, Rocketship spends half as much per pupil than traditional schools.

Maureen Downey:

Researcher William H. Schmidt believes education has become a game of chance in which the odds of success are predicated on factors outside the control of the students, including where they live, the schools they attend, the teachers they have and the textbooks they use.
An internationally recognized researcher on effective math education, Schmidt says that U.S. students lack equal opportunities to learn math, something he saw firsthand when he took sabbatical from Michigan State University to spend a year at the University of Virginia.
As an author of Michigan’s math standards, Schmidt knew his second grader would have been learning multiplication tables up to the number five back home in East Lansing. In Virginia, multiplication was not taught at all in second grade, reinforcing what Schmidt already realized from his international comparisons: All math classes are not equal and students do not have the same opportunities to learn math.

Laura Waters:

N.J. charter schools are, by statute and conception, public schools. They are funded by public money on a per pupil basis, just like traditional schools, although the sending districts keep a small portion. They are all non-profits.
They adhere to the same fiscal and curricular metrics as other N.J. public schools. The kids take the same tests. Staff members can unionize, although they don’t have to. Admissions policies can’t discriminate against kids new to the English language or children with disabilities. 

The charter universe in N.J. is tiny, serving only 2 percent of students, mostly poor minority kids.
While there’s no current legislation that restricts new charters to needy districts, eight of the nine new charters just approved by the DOE are in Newark, Camden, Jersey City, and Willingboro.

Katie Kindelan, via a kind reader’s email:

A C+ is considered average on the grading scale but for one California high school student it was well below average, enough so that he filed a lawsuit against both his teacher and school district.
Bowen Bethards, 17, was a sophomore in Peggy Carlock’s chemistry class at Albany High School in Albany, Calif., outside of San Francisco, in the 2010-11 school year when she gave him the C+ grade at the center of the suit, according to court records first reported by the Albany Patch.
Bethards, in a lawsuit filed with his mother, Laureen, in Contra Costa County Superior Court last month, claims that he has suffered severe physical and emotional suffering, damage to his academic reputation, and diminished chances of getting into his college of choice because of the grade.
The Bethards claim that Carlock, who no longer teaches at the school, punished Bowen for missing class on a day that his fellow students performed a lab. Bethards, according to the suit, had to miss class to attend the adoption hearing for his younger sister and so informed Carlock of his absence ahead of time. The two agreed upon a make-up date but when Bethards showed up on the agreed-upon date, he says, Carlock said he could not make up the lab and was instead, “going to fail him,” according to court documents.

Paul Caron:

Following up on my previous post, Baylor Law School Sends Mass Email With Personal Data on Each of its 442 Admitted Students (Apr. 6, 2012): C. Michael Kamps, a CPA who was denied admission to Baylor Law School, has filed an age discrimination lawsuit agains the school based in part on the improperly released data, claiming that his 169 LSAT was higher than 97% of Baylor’s admitted class and that the school failed to take into account the fact that his 3.2 GPA from Texas A&M (Class of 1979) was earned in the days before rampant grade inflation.

From the complaint (2MB PDF):

Plaintiff, more than thirty years ago, graduated from a major and wel-respected university in the top quarter of his class comprising primarily his similarly aged peers.
Plaintiff first applied to Defendant Baylor University’s Law School in 2009, for the fall quarter commencing in 2010. Plaintiff also applied for a specific merit based scholarship with published and long-established qualifying criteria which Plaintiff met. The candidate pol for this class, and for the scholarship, generally consisted of applicants substantially younger than Plaintiff.
2. Plaintiff expected to be, and insists that he be, allowed to compete on an equal footing with the much younger candidates for admission to Law School and access to merit based scholarships.
Plaintiff expects, and insists, that Defendants judge and evaluate his application as one submitted by a top quarter graduate of a major and wel- respected university.
3. Defendants refuse and insist upon applying disparate standards to older vs. younger candidates. Defendants pretend that these are not disparate standards at all ,but rather one factually neutral and uniform standard.
These standards, as applied by Defendants, are biased with respect to age and are therefore in violation of the Age Discrimination Act of 1975, 42U.S.C.§6101etseq., (“the Act”) and its implementing Regulations at 34C.F.R. Part 10 (“Regulations”). Defendants persist in this practice
even while faced with overwhelming evidence of, and while actually acknowledging, the bias.
Plaintiff scored at the 97th percentile on the Law School Admissions Test (“LSAT”), with a score of 169. Plaintiffs “Baylor Index,” an index calculated by multiplying Plaintiff’s UGPA by a factor of 10 and adding that product to Plaintiffs LSAT score, is 201.

Andrew Hacker:

A TYPICAL American school day finds some six million high school students and two million college freshmen struggling with algebra. In both high school and college, all too many students are expected to fail. Why do we subject American students to this ordeal? I’ve found myself moving toward the strong view that we shouldn’t.
My question extends beyond algebra and applies more broadly to the usual mathematics sequence, from geometry through calculus. State regents and legislators — and much of the public — take it as self-evident that every young person should be made to master polynomial functions and parametric equations.

Jon Udell:

In the mid-2000s I made some friends in the world of higher education who were starting to think like the web and to imagine how that might transform an institution that everyone could see needed to change. One of them, Gardner Campbell, invited me to speak at the University of Mary Washington’s Faculty Academy on Instructional Technologies. There I met an inspired team of thinkers and doers who were pioneering the academic use of what we now call cloud technology.
UMW isn’t a wealthy school; there wasn’t a big budget for IT; that was a constraint well embraced. Gardner’s dream team found their way to BlueHost where, for $8/month, they could spin up web servers, wikis, and most importantly the blogs that have become central to the intellectual life of the school. Here’s Jim Groom, aka Mr. Edupunk, reflecting on what UMW Blogs has become.

Bill Berezowitz and Tim Sheehy:

As the CEO of Manpower Group, Jeff Joerres knows a lot about what’s required to fill the job needs of employers all over the globe, and as he has noted “we are in the human age, where economies compete and survive based mainly on talent.”
Wisconsin’s release of a new measure of student academic performance in grade and high school was a warning sign worth our attention (“Student scores slip with new standard,” July 17). Credit goes to the state Department of Public Instruction, led by Superintendent Tony Evers, for its on-point and timely release of this new data showing how Wisconsin’s students perform when we use a higher common standard to compare with students in other states.
The results were tough to swallow, 36% proficient in reading and 48% proficient in math on standards that are more representative of what is needed to compete nationally and globally. It looks as if we have been training our students on the low hurdles, when in reality we are running in an international high-hurdle race where jobs are the finish line.
We recently attended a conference sponsored by GE on this very topic. The national audience of business and education leaders came together to better understand the implications of all states adopting a common core set of standards to measure educational performance in K-12. Wisconsin has significant ground to make up.

Through the looking glass.
wisconsin2.org

Maria Popova:

“The real enemy is the man who tries to mold the human spirit so that it will not dare to spread its wings.”
In an age obsessed with practicality, productivity, and efficiency, I frequently worry that we are leaving little room for abstract knowledge and for the kind of curiosity that invites just enough serendipity to allow for the discovery of ideas we didn’t know we were interested in until we are, ideas that we may later transform into new combinations with applications both practical and metaphysical.
This concern, it turns out, is hardly new. In The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge (PDF), originally published in the October 1939 issue of Harper’s, American educator Abraham Flexner explores this dangerous tendency to forgo pure curiosity in favor of pragmatism — in science, in education, and in human thought at large — to deliver a poignant critique of the motives encouraged in young minds, contrasting those with the drivers that motivated some of history’s most landmark discoveries.

Jay Matthews:

A literature professor at a Washington-area college wasn’t surprised by my column last week on the terrible quality of college essays purchased on the Internet. She had suffered from the output of the paper mills and told me a story illustrating how bogus work sells even when it is bad.
One of her students wanted to raise his grade with extra-credit work. Because he had not understood a 19th-century novel that was key to her course, she said, she suggested that he “read a particular journal article and write a short summary/review of the author’s analysis.”
She thought this would be a plagiarism-proof assignment. She may have been right about that, but the essay she received had other flaws.
“It was clear to me that the writer of the submitted paper had read no more than two or three pages of the article, and although it was well-written, it did not really answer the assignment,” she said. “I suspected that the paper was custom-ordered and custom-written.”

Debra Weber-Wulff:

A spectre is haunting Europe, and this time it is the spectre of plagiarism and scientific misconduct. Some high-profile politicians have had to resign in the last 18 months – but the revelations are also shaking respected European universities.
Many European countries, especially Germany, have long considered it unnecessary to give plagiarism more than a cursory look. One trusts in the self-cleansing powers of science, end of story.
Last February, a reviewer of German Defence Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg’s doctoral dissertation discovered and documented some plagiarised passages.
When the papers pounced on this, zu Guttenberg denied any wrongdoing, calling the accusations “absurd”. If he had messed up the odd footnote, he said he would fix it for the second edition.

Lauren Casey & Suzanna Couch:

Perry Meridian Middle School student Trevor Russell will head back to his Indianapolis education facility on Tuesday – what many consider the middle of summer – but he’s excited.
He gets to see friends sooner. He’s going to have more breaks throughout the year. And he thinks he might start the semester remembering more from last year.
“I think most of my friends are excited too,” Trevor said. “We usually get bored by the end of summer break because it is so long, so now we get to see each other more during the year.”

Thomas Zachek:

Sometimes I wish I could take the education establishment by the throat and throttle it.
I know, I know – teachers are the problem. But teachers are like foot soldiers on the front lines, carrying out orders but rarely having a say in them. The real education establishment is the administrators, board members, legislators, think tanks, textbook publishers, testing services, educational researchers and “experts” who truly create the education agenda in our society. And these forces place teachers and students in a tug of war with political agendas and shifting priorities.
Anyone in education for more than a decade has seen trends come and go. I remember when everything had to be geared to the college-bound. Then came the Tech-Prep Initiative, wherein we were reminded that not everybody needed to go to college and schools needed to prepare students for workforce skills. I remember the eras of behavioral objectives, of Madeline Hunter, of WIDS. If you don’t know what those mean, think buggy whips or Betamax.

Melissa Korn:

It’s drilled into college students’ heads from day one: get an internship, you’ll get a job.
But a new survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers finds that the equation isn’t quite so tidy. That internship might lead to a job-but your chances are far better if you’re getting paid.
The group released a study this week showing that 60% of 2012 graduates who worked a paid internship got at least one job offer, while just 37% of those in unpaid gigs got any offers. That’s slightly – only slightly – better than the offer rate for graduates who skipped internships entirely, at 36%.
Unpaid internships are ubiquitous. A 2010 survey from NACE found that nearly 95% of member schools allow organizations to post unpaid internship opportunities, and less than a third of those require students to earn academic credit or some form of certificate for their work. Intern Bridge, a recruiting research and consulting firm, found that more than half of internships reported for its 2011 Internship Salary Report were unpaid.

Priya Abraham:

Eleanor Chute’s July 19 story “Report Criticizes Progress at Cyber Charter Schools” cites a new University of Colorado study showing that students in public cyber schools using education provider K12 Inc. programs are “falling behind.” However, the article and study neglect important facts on Pennsylvania performance and funding.
While cyber schools are similar to school districts in both size and age groups served, they are assessed at a higher standard than school districts because of a flaw in Pennsylvania’s education assessment system. To make adequate yearly progress, districts need to meet performance goals for only one age group, whether elementary, middle or high school. In contrast, individual schools including cyber schools must meet AYP standards overall, or they fail.
Moreover, Ms. Chute repeats an error advanced by the Colorado researchers and state Auditor General Jack Wagner that asserts cyber schools spend less per student than traditional public schools and therefore should get less funding. But cyber schools spend less because they receive less.

Associated Press:

GARY, Ind. (AP) — A company appointed by Indiana to run and try to turn around a troubled Gary high school is suing the Gary Community School Corp., demanding that it turn over student records it needs to run the school.
Edison Learning Inc. senior vice president Todd McIntire told The Times of Munster (http://bit.ly/MK29IQ ) for a story published Wednesday that the lawsuit requires the district to release student records and provide the for-profit firm with services as required by law, including those associated with student transportation and school maintenance.

Motoko Rich:

In excusing more than half of the states from meeting crucial requirements of the No Child Left Behind education law, the Obama administration sought to require states to develop more realistic tools to improve and measure the progress of schools and teachers.
A report being issued on Friday by the liberal Center for American Progress shows that while some states have proposed reforms aimed at spurring schools and teachers to improve student performance, others may be introducing weaker measures of accountability.
“The increased flexibility of the waivers means that some states will experiment and move ahead,” said Jeremy Ayers, associate director of federal education programs at the organization, “while others may backtrack.”

The Wall Street Journal:

Muskegon Heights and Highland Park–two of Michigan’s most insolvent school districts–this year are handing their classroom keys over to charter school operators to save money. That’s good news for local taxpayers, but the biggest beneficiaries may be the kids.
Both districts were running deficits that approached two-thirds of their budgets, thanks to the double whammy of rising labor costs and declining enrollment. To help the districts avert bankruptcy, Governor Rick Snyder appointed emergency managers who under a new state law can break collective-bargaining agreements. While such flexibility was essential to get their books in order, it may not have been sufficient.
According to Muskegon Heights manager Don Weatherspoon, the district would have to slash salaries by 35%–reducing hourly wage rates to about $10–merely to break even. That would have likely caused a teacher walk-out. When the emergency manager for Detroit schools last month proposed extending a 10% pay cut for a year, teachers threatened to strike.

Kevin Carey:

On October 8, 2011, California Gov. Jerry Brown took a stand. Throughout the 2011 session of the California General Assembly, Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg had been pushing legislation designed to revamp the state’s system for holding K-12 schools accountable for student success. California’s Academic Performance Index (API) system hadn’t been updated since 1999 and relied mostly on standardized tests of basic proficiency in reading and math. Steinberg’s bill, SB 547, would have changed the system to include graduation rates and measures of career and college readiness.1 The bill passed both the Assembly and Senate by wide margins and with bipartisan support, in addition to the backing of diverse organizations including business groups, charter school operators, and school administrators.

News that Madison’s new, interim Superintendent Jane Belmore seeks to add a “Chief of Staff” provides taxpayers, parents and students an opportunity to reflect on the District’s priorities within the planned $376,200,000 2012-2013 budget ($15,132/student).
The District’s job #1, in my view is to address its reading problems. A kind reader mentioned that Reading Recovery was discussed at this past Monday’s school board meeting (video).
Will the status quo continue?
Related: Madison Schools Administration has “introduced more than 18 programs and initiatives for elementary teachers since 2009”.

Luke Thomas:

As I mentioned in my previous post, I’m pretty disappointed with the majority of my college classes over the past few years. I’ve spent quite a bit of time working on creating a sample curriculum that I wish I had in college; after all, what’s the point in complaining without coming up with an alternative?
In high school I was home-schooled & attended a technical center in conjunction with taking college classes, so my past educational experience wasn’t “the norm.” I’ll be borrowing certain elements from my past, simply because they worked for me!
While I’ll be the first to admit that this curriculum is not for everyone (in fact, it’s only for a small set of self-learners); my purpose is to challenge assumptions and create a simple learning framework for a fraction of the cost of a college degree.

Spokane Superintendent Shelley Redinger recently posted a survey. Via a kind Laurie Rogers email.
Spokane plans to spend $316,584,805 [2012-2013 Budget Document] for 29,275 students or $10,814.17/student, about 28% less than Madison’s $15,132. Compare the community demographics here: Madison | Spokane.

Col. Chuck Bowes:

Today’s high school graduates suffer from systemically deficient abilities in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) that poses considerable challenges to our increasingly technological military force. Research findings reported by the United States Mission to the Organization for Economic and Co-operation Development (OECD) reveals that U.S. middle school and high school students are habitually under-performing their international peers in STEM achievement measures.
President Obama, Secretary of Education Duncan, and Bill Gates also express concern that too few young people are acquiring the knowledge they need to use technology in creative and innovative ways. As U.S. student STEM achievement continues to race to the bottom of all industrialized competitors, adding non-volunteer recruits worsens the problem.

Reeve Hamilton:

The Texas State University System is the state’s third major university system to announce the development of a bachelor’s degree that only costs $10,000 — a response to Gov. Rick Perry’s 2011 call for more affordable higher education offerings.
Sul Ross State University Rio Grande College, an upper-division college in the Texas State University System, has partnered with Southwest Texas Junior College to create a new “10K Scholars Program.” Its degree model, which will become available in fall 2013, appears to be something of a hybrid of the previous two models introduced in the state.
Texas A&M University-San Antonio partnered with Alamo Colleges to offer a bachelor’s of applied arts and sciences in information technology with an emphasis on computer security. In order to keep costs down, students must earn an associate’s degree while still in high school and then take advantage of the lower costs at one of the Alamo community colleges before proceeding to A&M-San Antonio. At the University of Texas-Permian Basin, a $10,000 degree can be earned entirely at the institution for students who qualify for the new Texas Science Scholar program, essentially providing them a merit scholarship that caps their tuition.

Joshua Kim:

My wife and I were both born in 1969. Here is a short list of debacles, missteps, and failures that we’ve witnessed in our time on the planet: stagflation, the energy crisis (gas lines), the tech bubble, the 2nd Iraq war, the housing bubble, and the great recession (and you can add to this list). Another way we could describe the past 40 or so years, if feeling negative, could be: rising inequality, stagnant real wages, rapid increases in health care and education costs, growth in structural unemployment/underemployment, and political polarization and ineffectiveness in the face of these challenges.
Christopher Hayes, editor-at-large for the Nation, thinks that many of the problems listed above can be traced back to the failures of elite decision making. These are problems that could have been avoided, or at least mitigated, if those in charge of the political and financial levers had demonstrated a modicum of clear thinking and firm leadership. Perhaps the 2003 Iraq invasion and failure of post-occupation planning is the most obvious elite failure, but in retrospect those policies that pumped up the housing bubble (lax regulation and non-existent oversight of sub-prime loans) constitute a clear example of elite malfeasance.

Lee Green:

The history of measurement may seem arcane, but consider how people centuries ago measured time, length, or the Earth’s rotation. Compare that to measuring atoms with a scanning tunneling microscope — and all the historic milestones in between.
Today IBM is releasing a free, interactive app, IBM THINK, for iPad and Android tablets. It shows how early tools have evolved into modern advances that make the world word work better — healthier populations, greener energy and safer, less congested cities. The app is for people of all ages who love science, history and technology — think of it as an “innovation time machine.”

Channel3000.com:

WISC-TV: Are you good at “minding the ship” or are you going to want to make some changes?
Belmore: I will be making a few changes and I already have a few things in the works. But those changes will be made in a very mindful way; I’m kind of looking at this as short-term changes for long-term good. So, I will not do anything that will drastically impede anyone else coming in. At the same time, I think there are a few changes that need to be made so we can have a year of growth and constantly moving ahead.
WISC-TV: What are some of those changes?
Belmore: One of them is that I’m kind of reorganizing a little bit so that some people are reporting directly to me who were not reporting directly to the superintendent in the current organizational scheme. Basically, that is just for the fact that (my tenure here) will be a year. I won’t have time to move through the steps of the organization; I’m going to need that communication directly with myself.

Much more on Madison’s interim Superintendent Jane Belmore, here.

Arthur Thomas:

The Harvard program, started by Peterson in 1996, seeks to develop a scientific basis for school reform policy.
In his speech, Walker said Wisconsin has undertaken more education reform in the last 18 months than during the last 18 years. He said it’s important to admit a problem exists.
Education reform doesn’t tilt toward either political party, according to Walker. He said politicians on both sides of the aisle have tried to tackle various issues.
“It comes from risk takers,” he said.
The study put the United States behind 24 countries in terms of improvement on test scores. Walker said it is important to break down denial about the country’s standing academically. If all states were able to match student achievement growth of the top five states in the study, the U.S. would be leading the world, he said.
“We’ve done it before in so many areas, we can do it here,” Walker said.

Related: Wisconsin’s Achievement Stagnation: 1992 – 2011 and wisconsin2.org.
Raising standards and comparing Wisconsin students to the best in the world is long overdue.
Meanwhile, Madison’s new “interim” Superintendent seeks to add a “Chief of Staff”.

Ray Fisman:

The conversation about how to improve American education has taken on an increasingly confrontational tone. The caricature often presented in the press depicts hard-driving, data-obsessed reformers–who believe the solution is getting rid of low-performing teachers–standing off against unions–who don’t trust any teaching metric and care more about their jobs than the children they’re supposed to be educating.
But in some ways the focus on jobs misses the point. As New York State School Chancellor John King has pointed out, with the exception of urban hubs like New York and L.A., few school districts have the luxury of firing low-performing teachers with the knowledge that new recruits will line up to take their places.
If we take firing off the table, what else can be done to resolve America’s education crisis? The findings of several recent studies by psychologists, economists, and educators show that–despite many reformers’ claims to the contrary–it may be possible to make low-performing teachers better, instead of firing them. If these studies can be replicated throughout entire school systems and across the country, we may be at the beginning of a revolution that will build a better educational system for America.

Marc Parry:

Campuses are places of intuition and serendipity: A professor senses confusion on a student’s face and repeats his point; a student majors in psychology after a roommate takes a course; two freshmen meet on the quad and eventually become husband and wife.
Now imagine hard data substituting for happenstance.
As Katye Allisone, a freshman at Arizona State University, hunkers down in a computer lab for an 8:35 a.m. math class, the Web-based course watches her back. Answers, scores, pace, click paths–it hoovers up information, like Google. But rather than personalizing search results, data shape Ms. Allisone’s class according to her understanding of the material.

Steve Kolowich:

The average student pursuing a postsecondary credential completely online is a white, 33-year-old woman with a full-time job and a household income around $65,000 per year, according to a new survey sponsored by two companies involved in online consulting.
This woman is likely to be studying business — the chosen field of 34 percent of students who are, recently were, or soon plan to be enrolled in fully online programs, according to the survey. Business administration and management, a popular avenue for students across all of academe, is far and away the most popular degree among the survey respondents, enrolling a greater percentage of fully online students than STEM fields, the social sciences, and the humanities combined.
“Schools simply cannot offer enough business programs if they want to attract large numbers of online students,” write the authors of the survey on behalf of its sponsors.
Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/07/25/survey-provides-insight-who-enrolls-fully-online-programs-and-why#ixzz21h0eOzWi
Inside Higher Ed

Suresh Gupta:

In order to appreciate the recent explosion of business opportunities related to private education in China, we need to understand the cultural realities that have played a contributing role. Some of these factors include the traditional Chinese family structure with its emphasis on education, China’s one child policy and China’s explosive economic growth during the past twenty years. Additionally, with the rising growth of its middle class (currently at fifty-two plus million and projected to grow to over ninety-eight million people by 2015), one is far from surprised to see an education market currently valued at over $240 billion dollars and estimated to grow by 15% a year. Deloitte predicts that by 2015, the private education sector will have reached a market size nearing or in excess of $102 Billion.

Laura Waters:

ELC says that the investigation was instigated by a series of articles in the Asbury Park Press, which detailed the district’s privileging of white Jewish students over the almost-entirely Hispanic and black public school students. While there are 28,000 schoolchildren in Lakewood, almost 22,000 attend private yeshivas. Current student enrollment in Lakewood Public Schools is about 5,600, almost all Hispanic and black. The district spends about 20% of its annual operating budget on transportation. (NJ districts transport students regardless of school location).
In addition, Lakewood sends many of its white special-needs kids to the School for Hidden Intelligence. Annual tuition is about $100,000 per student per year. Minority special needs kids stay in-district and receive sub-standard services.

S. Katherine Nelson, Kostadin Kushlev, Tammy English, Elizabeth W. Dunn, Sonja Lyubomirsky

Recent scholarly and media accounts paint a portrait of unhappy parents who find remarkably little joy in taking care of their children, but the scientific basis for these claims remains inconclusive. In three studies, we used a strategy of converging evidence to test whether parents evaluate their lives more positively than do non-parents (Study 1), feel relatively better than non-parents on a day-to-day basis (Study 2), and experience more positive feelings during childcare than other daily activities (Study 3). The results indicate that, contrary to previous reports, parents (and especially fathers) report relatively higher levels of happiness, positive emotion, and meaning in life.
Modern evolutionary psychologists position parenting at the top of the pyramid of human needs, reflecting its central role in human life (Kenrick, Griskevicius, Neuberg, & Schaller, 2010). Yet, some research has indicated that parenting is associated with reduced well-being (e.g., Evenson & Simon, 2005; Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, & Stone, 2004; McLanahan & Adams, 1987). In particular, attention has revolved around a study showing that working mothers in Texas enjoy parenting less than watching TV, shopping, or preparing food (Kahneman et al., 2004).
Although recent media accounts paint a dismal picture of parenting, the underlying scientific research is surprisingly unclear and inconsistent. Meta-analyses have linked parenthood to lower marital satisfaction on average (Twenge, Campbell, & Foster, 2003) and to decreases in life satisfaction in the months after childbirth (Luhmann, Hoffman, Eid, & Lucas, 2012). Few analyses, however, directly compare parents and non-parents on global measures of well-being. Instead, most investigations control for multiple demographic variables, which vary across studies. Some of these studies find that parents exhibit a higher prevalence of depression (Evenson & Simon, 2005), along with less positive and more negative affect (Ross & Van Willigen, 1996), than non-parents, whereas others reveal a net zero or small negative parenting effect (e.g., Blanchflower & Oswald, 2004; Di Tella, MacCulloch, & Oswald, 2003; Ferrer-i- Carbonell, 2005). Furthermore, other work suggests that parents do not experience these negative outcomes (Keizer, Dykstra, & Poortman, 2010; Kohler, Behrman & Skytthe, 2005; Rothrauff & Cooney, 2008), and, on the contrary, report relatively higher feelings of meaning, gratification, and reward (Russell, 1974; Umberson & Gove, 1989; White & Dolan, 2009). Such conflicting findings could be due to the use of divergent methods, analytical approaches, and measures, making it almost impossible to draw clear conclusions from this literature. The importance of this topic and its prominence in popular discourse demonstrates the need for rigorous examination of the link between parenthood and well-being, using multiple methods and broad well-being measures.

Sanette Tanaka:

At Augustana College, they call it “the short goodbye.”
It’s when administrators at the small private college in Rock Island, Ill., give parents 15 minutes to say goodbye to their children. Then, students are told to report to the gym for freshman orientation, while parents are basically told to shove off.
“Parents go meet with advisers in small groups to compose themselves, and then they need to go home,” says Evelyn Campbell, dean and vice president of student services at Augustana.
Faced with what a Syracuse University administrator calls “the most over-involved generation of all time,” colleges across the country are increasingly focusing on parents who are struggling with the transition from high school to college. Colleges are holding special orientation seminars for parents, appointing administrators to handle outreach with parents and providing emailed newsletters and specific parent portal websites, among other services.
One of the toughest parts, administrators say, is educating parents how to stay involved without coming across as overbearing, or worse, a hovering “helicopter parent.”

Andrew Vanacore:

The state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, or BESE, approved a new set of academic standards Tuesday for private schools participating in Louisiana’s expanded voucher program. By a vote of 9 to 2, the 11-member panel adopted a plan proposed by state Superintendent John White that will require private schools to hit roughly the same academic bar that public schools do in order to continue accepting public funding, though only if they take 40 or more students through the program.
The plan sparked heated debate among board members, with Lottie Beebe, from St. Martin Parish, and Carolyn Hill, from Baton Rouge, twice trying to get the decision put off until White could come back with tougher standards. Hill compared the board’s vote to Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, warning that “evil is going to arise” from the board’s decision.
Chas Roemer, a board member who also represents parts of Baton Rouge, offered the most full-throated support for White, calling the vote “one of our proudest moments as a board.”

Terran Lane

There’s been a lot of excitement in the media about Stanford’s 100,000+ student computer science courses, MIT’s open-sourced classes, and other efforts at mass, distance-education. In some ways, these efforts really are thrilling — they offer the first truly deep structural change in how we do education in perhaps a thousand years. They offer democratization of education — opening up access to world-class education to people from all over the globe and of diverse economic and social backgrounds. How many Ramanujans might we enable, if only we could get high-quality education to more people?
But I have to sound three notes of caution about this trend.
First, I worry that mass-production here will have the same effect that it has had on manufacturing for over two centuries: administrators and regents, eager to save money, will push for ever larger remote classes and fewer faculty to teach them. Are we approaching a day in which there is only one professor of computer science for the whole US?
Second, I suspect that the “winners win” cycle will distort academia the same way that it has industry and society. When freed of constraints of distance and tuition, why wouldn’t every student choose a Stanford or MIT education over, say, UNM? How long before we see the AT&T, Microsoft, or Google of academia? How long before 1% of the universities and professors garner 99% of the students and resources?

Douglas Fick:

Imagine this scene: A young high school graduate, the class valedictorian, sits at the kitchen table with his parents, his newly opened acceptance letter from Cornell lying in front of him. Mom is crying softly, while Dad awkwardly pats his son’s shoulder with a goofy grin plastered on his face.
“What about the money, Dad?” his son asks.
“We’ll figure it out somehow,” Dad replies as he starts to wonder how to come up with anything close to the $43,000 yearly tuition. The boy has worked so hard and come so far; there is no way he is letting money keep him from his dream school.
Now comes the second big moment. The boy has been mulling it over for months.
“I finally decided what I want to study when I get there. I know it’s right for me,” he hesitates. “I want to be an elementary school teacher!” His parents leap from their chairs and literally jump for joy as the pride and excitement washes over them.

Ram Ramachandran:

MALAYSIA has set for itself an ambitious goal to become the region’s premier centre for higher education, aiming to attract 200,000 international students to its shores by 2020, on top of its local student intake.
Success will mean that Malaysia would have been able to shake off stiff competition from neighbouring Singapore or even Indonesia, rake in billions in educational revenue and add significant depth to the country’s manpower pool to ensure future growth in a knowledge-driven economy.
However, high costs of building infrastructure and the speed required to attract students and roll out curriculum effectively could pose major bottlenecks.
The price of failure will not only be lower student enrolment and insufficient skilled workers but also will deny Malaysia the opportunity to position itself as a leading global player in offering off-campus online education — another opportunity which can have major benefits for the country.

Esther Quintero:

It’s probably too early to say whether Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are a “tsunami” or a “seismic shift,” but, continuing with the natural disaster theme, the last few months have seen a massive “avalanche” of press commentary about them, especially within the last few days.
Also getting lots of press attention (though not as much right now) is Adaptive/Personalized Learning. Both innovations seem to fascinate us, but probably for different reasons, since they are so fundamentally different at their cores. Personalized Learning, like more traditional concepts of education, places the individual at the center. With MOOCs, groups and social interaction take center stage and learning becomes a collective enterprise.
This post elaborates on this distinction, but also points to a recent blurring of the lines between the two – a development that could be troubling.

The Center for Education Reform:

The CER Education Map provides a unique and compelling look at how the states are doing in providing the critical policy ingredients necessary for effective schools to serve all children. Though individual states may — like real weather patterns — have varying forecasts, the sunny spots are few and far between. Each state has been given an grade for each of several components, and those grades collectively factor into an overall grade and general education weather forecast for that state. As states adopt new policies and programs, the grades may change.

Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah

Chicago Public Schools will hire nearly 500 teachers for subjects including art, computer tech and physical education to accommodate a longer day for students that will only marginally increase the workday for teachers, under a plan announced Tuesday by CPS and Chicago Teachers Union officials.
The longer school day has been a major sticking point in ongoing contract negotiations between teachers and the district, and the deal announced Tuesday could go a long way to avoiding a threatened teachers strike.
Under the proposal, the day for elementary school students will remain at 7 hours, while high schoolers will be in school for 7 1/2 hours four days of the week, as originally planned.

Mark Garrison:

Tess Vigeland: Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street? By way of India?
The Children’s Television Workshop has built Sesame into a global brand over nearly half a century. It broadcasts in more than 145 countries and licenses everything from books to Elmo toys. Now in India, it’s launched a franchise business of for-profit Sesame Street-branded schools. It plans to open 20 preschools by next spring and 380 within five years.
Marketplace’s Mark Garrison has this report, brought to you by the letters N and Y, for New York

In ancient China, upper-class women had their feet tightly bound as children, preventing the bones from growing normally, so that they could be hindered in their walking, and only capable of cute little “feminine” steps around the house.
We don’t do that, of course. What we do instead with all our young people is see to it that they do not read a single complete history book in school (maiming their knowledge of history) and we confine their writing mostly to fiction, compositions about themselves, or brief little five-paragraph “essays” about something else (doesn’t matter what), which cripples their ability to write.
Even when we ask them to apply to college and show us their writing, admissions officers ask only for 500-word pieces in which they talk about themselves and their lives.
In Boston the Boston Globe has a competition that asks young people to write about courage. But is it the courage of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, or John Quincy Adams, or James Otis, or Patrick Henry or John Paul Jones, or Florence Nightingale that they want to hear about? Not a chance. They want the youngsters to write about their own courage, for instance perhaps when they spoke to a fellow student who was not popular, etc.
Thus we bind their learning and their imagination, and we try to prevent their access to knowledge of history and the achievements of mankind, and we try to keep them from learning how to write a serious term paper or read a substantial history book.
Why is this happening? One example of the problem is a writing consultant from Teachers’ College, Columbia, who was given a $50,000,000 (yes, $50 million) contract to teach students reading and writing in New York City. When I asked her if she would be having the students write about history, she told me: “I teach writing, I don’t get into content that much.” So, naturally, the students her grant enabled her to “work” with probably didn’t get into content that much either.
Mark Bauerlein wrote (The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future) that on the NAEP history test 57 percent scored “Below Basic.” To score “Basic,” the student has to know who George Washington was. To score “Below Basic” the student has to know that Scooby-Doo was never President, but they probably could not name anyone who ever was President. “Of those taking the exam, a majority, 52 percent, when asked to identify a U.S. Ally during World War II selected a member of the Axis powers–Germany, Italy, and Japan–rather than the Soviet Union” [or Great Britain].
We hear lots of complaints from many quarters that our kids are ignorant of history and cannot write. It would have made as much sense to criticize upper-class Chinese women in the Imperial days because they had such poor times in the 100-yard dash.
If we continue to keep history books away from our students, and limit their writing to brief solipsistic exercises, then we can only expect that they will continue to demonstrate the damage we have done to them, when we test them and look over the writing they are able to produce for us.
==============
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
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Jay Matthews:

Forty-five years ago, I married the best editor I have ever known. Most of the reasons I love Linda have nothing to do with writing, but it’s useful to have her around when wrestling with a difficult column.
I’m lucky. Few people are willing to and capable of helping others produce engaging and instructive prose. Many editors of my books were helpful, but I still remember the one who did not change a word, good for my ego but not for the book. Newspaper editors, at The Washington Post and elsewhere, have more stories to deal with than ever before, but no more time to fix them.
This problem is particularly acute in our schools, where almost all of us learn to write. I got little instruction before a required composition class my sophomore year of college. The situation has gotten worse since then. Few teachers have enough experience and training to show students what is good writing and what is not. Those who have that skill lack the time to share it with all their students and still have lives.
In a recent column, Michael Shaughnessy of EducationViews.org discussed this with Will Fitzhugh, whose Concord Review publishes exemplary high school research papers. They agreed that writing instruction is in crisis. The latest solution – letting computers grade papers – is a dead end.
“These programs don’t care if you are writing an ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’ or an ‘Ode to an iPhone,’ ” Fitzhugh said. “The content is of no interest to the robo-graders. They are programmed only to ‘worry’ about a small circumscribed set of writing skills, and the subject of your composition counts for nothing. You can write a dull composition, which amply displays ignorance, and still get a good score from the computers.”
To be fair to the software that reads essays, and the people who created it, in most cases at least one human being also assesses the writing when the grade means something. Rachel Toor, a former editor who is an associate professor of creative writing at Eastern Washington University, acknowledged in a piece she wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education that a student can be helped by an Apple program that points out clichés, wordy phrases and needlessly complex words, such as “conceptualizing” instead of “thinking.”
But the rest of Toor’s essay was chilling. She cares about improving her students’ writing. She finds that most college professors won’t or can’t do it. At a party, she met a political scientist with an Ivy League education who teaches at a good liberal arts college. He told her he never commented on his students’ writing. “It’s simply not part of his grading process,” she wrote. “He assesses their ideas, he says, not the prose.”
When she asked how he could separate the ideas from their expression, he said “he didn’t feel that he had the expertise to comment on their writing,” she wrote. “He wouldn’t know, he said, what good writing looked like.” She asked whether he thought he was a good writer. “He said yes, because he’s been published,” she wrote.
That suggests that it is better to teach writing in high school. I know several fine, if marginally employed, journalists who could do it. Writing is often mentioned as one of the premier 21st century skills, and it can be taught without exhausting the teachers.
Require students to take at least one semester of reading and writing instead of their regular English class. A paper is due each Monday. In class, students read whatever they like or work on next week’s essay while the teacher calls them up in turn and edits their papers as they watch.
At the end of the day, there are no stacks of student papers to ruin the instructor’s home life. Each student gets personal attention. Even Linda Mathews might be persuaded to teach that class.

Jay Matthews:

Forty-five years ago, I married the best editor I have ever known. Most of the reasons I love Linda have nothing to do with writing, but it’s useful to have her around when wrestling with a difficult column.
I’m lucky. Few people are willing to and capable of helping others produce engaging and instructive prose. Many editors of my books were helpful, but I still remember the one who did not change a word, good for my ego but not for the book. Newspaper editors, at The Washington Post and elsewhere, have more stories to deal with than ever before, but no more time to fix them.
This problem is particularly acute in our schools, where almost all of us learn to write. I got little instruction before a required composition class my sophomore year of college. The situation has gotten worse since then. Few teachers have enough experience and training to show students what is good writing and what is not. Those who have that skill lack the time to share it with all their students and still have lives.
In a recent column, Michael Shaughnessy of EducationViews.org discussed this with Will Fitzhugh, whose Concord Review publishes exemplary high school research papers. They agreed that writing instruction is in crisis. The latest solution — letting computers grade papers — is a dead end.

Stephanie Simon:

Parents in the impoverished desert community of Adelanto, California, will become the first in the nation to seize control of a failing public school under a controversial “parent trigger” law, the parents announced Monday.
The Adelanto School District had fought to preserve control over Desert Trails Elementary School. But on Friday, Superior Court Judge Steve Malone ruled that the parents had met all the requirements under the trigger law by gathering signatures from the legal guardians of at least half the students at Desert Trails.
Judge Malone ordered the district to validate the petitions and clear the way for parents to take over the school.

Richard Vedder:

The new Sallie Mae-Gallup survey of attitudes toward higher education, “How America Pays for College 2012,” shows that Americans are becoming increasingly resistant to rising college prices. Some people who were saying “I want the best college money can buy” a few years ago, are now saying “We aren’t going to pay sky-high tuition when there are much cheaper colleges nearly as good.”
How sensitive are people to price? I woke up in the middle of the night with a minor epiphany about this. My surmise is that, by and large, in the era before massive federal student loan programs and also smaller private scholarship offerings, the demand for college was highly elastic–people were extremely sensitive to price. In, say, 1925, when family incomes in today’s dollars were typically perhaps $20,000 or $25,000, the cost of any school was burdensome, and the Ivy League, costing perhaps $8,000 or $10,000 a year for all costs (in today’s dollars), was a luxury for the truly rich, while state schools, costing perhaps $4,000 a year, were available for some middle class people but by no means all.
Fast forward to today. Incomes have doubled or tripled, but the cost of college has gone up far more -five or six fold. The availability of loans and the development of a culture arguing that higher education is a good “investment” has made the demand for college not only larger, but also far more insensitive to price. A good college is now considered a necessity of life, almost like salt or life-sustaining drugs, whereas earlier it was what John Stuart Mill might call a “superfluidity.”

Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:

Those remarks seemed unduly negative and failed to give full recognition to the myriad qualities this market offers any newcomer. Like many, we favor the “who wouldn’t want to work in Madison?” view.
Not to worry, said School Board member Ed Hughes, who asked the question that prompted Ray’s comments at last week’s meeting.
“It was reassuring to me,” Hughes said. “It showed they had done their homework about this market. I thought it was realistic and useful.”
Next, Ray and Co. will talk to board members about their desires for a superintendent, then add some community outreach to the fact-finding process. If all goes well, this nationwide search will yield a strong, successful leader for one of the most important jobs in town.

Madison certainly has the community, financial and nearby (University of Wisconsin, Madison College, Edgewood College) assets to offer a world class K-12 education. Getting there will require substantial change and… change is very hard.

Teresa Watanabe:

On a ranch of willows and wild grass outside Sacramento, the cowboy cooed to his tawny mustang. Then he led Little Buck through basic commands — back up, step forward — and rewarded him with a biscuit.
Dennis Parker is a part-Cherokee trainer in rural Zamora, Calif., who sports a silver ponytail beneath his cowboy hat. But his recent demonstration was aimed at training a different breed grappling with far bigger tasks: educators under mounting pressure to raise students’ standardized test scores.
As a dozen educators watched, Parker explained that good relationships are key toward boosting achievement and that horses and humans both respond to similar strategies. Build rapport with friendly chatter. Gain respect by giving out tasks. And give treats not simply as rewards but just to be fun.
“Can you do that with your kids?” Parker asked. “It’s like training horses; you don’t break them, you teach them.”

Stacy Teicher Khadaroo, via a kind reader’s email:

In a first-of-its-kind legal maneuver, students whose reading skills are below grade level are suing their state and school district. If successful, the lawsuit could spawn others nationwide
Students are suing the state of Michigan and their Detroit-area school district for violating their “right to read.”
The class-action lawsuit appears to be the first of its kind, and potentially signals a new wave of civil rights litigation in the United States to enforce laws intended to boost academic achievement, education law experts say.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan filed what it has dubbed the “right to read” lawsuit on behalf of the nearly 1,000 students in the impoverished district.
Two-thirds of 4th-graders and three-quarters of 7th-graders in the Highland Park school district are not proficient on state reading tests; 90 percent of 12th-graders fail the reading portion of the final state test administered in high school, according to the complaint. Nearly 100 percent of the district’s students are African-American.

Maureen Downey:

“I think this is the most remarkable social development certainly of the last few years,” said Eric D. Fingerhut at a Brookings Institution panel last week. The former chancellor of the Ohio Board of Regents, Fingerhut is vice president of education and STEM learning for the research firm Batelle.
“One of America’s greatest products is our higher education system,” said Fingerhut. “And we are opening it up for free to people anywhere in the world. You’d be amazed how many people have broadband connectivity, but didn’t have access to a University of Virginia course or a Stanford course. There are, in fact, people all over the world accessing for free that which only an elite, small number of people could utilize.”

Steve Malanga:

Californians should understand those fiscal pressures. Average annual pay for a local government employee in the state rose by 60%, to $61,185 (excluding benefits), between 1999 and 2008, according to the Little Hoover Commission on California State Government Organization and Economy. That’s about 70% more than the increase in private sector wages in the state over the same period. Average pay for cops and firefighters climbed 69%, to $89,056, again excluding benefits, in the same period.
Benefit costs have soared even more than wages. The annual cost of funding pensions in California’s 20 largest municipalities has grown from $1.3 billion in 1999 to $5.1 billion last year, according to a study by Stanford University professor Joe Nation. That’s an annual growth rate of better than 11%.
Faced with such increases, municipalities in California haven’t had nearly the flexibility to mend their budgets that officials in Wisconsin have.
In San Jose, where the average cost of employing a city worker, including benefits, has soared to an extraordinary $142,000 annually, Mayor Chuck Reed had to fight long and hard for a ballot measure to reduce pension costs that was passed by voters in June. In the three years before the vote, the city had to lay off about 2,000 employees and cut back on parks, libraries and other services.

Stephanie Simon/a>:

New Educational Foundations, via a kind Richard Phelps email

In a top-down era of rubrics, standards, and bureaucracy, and in an unprecedented atmosphere of teacher-bashing, NEW EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATIONS will offer independent and alternative voices. We invite outside-the-box critiques and nonstandard suggestions, ranging from opinion pieces to scholarly articles, for an online refereed journal of ideas and dialogue.
Because we expect to establish NEW EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATIONS (NEF) within the framework of a nonprofit organization, we are relying on NewFoundations Press (newfoundations.com) for support only during our start-up phase.
In this journal we are looking for neither cheerleading nor venting — those are for blogs. We will neither favor nor reject any ideological bent, since as a group, we, the editors and reviewers of NEF ourselves, represent different, often conflicting commitments to fundamental beliefs.
Nor do we want to nurture either the culture of complaint or that of compliance — we have politicians who do that for a living. Rather, we are looking for the kind of ideas and research that just don’t normally arise in committee meetings or handpicked commissions, selecting for quality of thought and presentation and editing principally for space and grammar.