Jay Matthews:

Stacie Brockman is the Prince George's County mother of lively twin 9-year-old boys. Her sons were born two months premature. She has done everything possible to deal with the disabilities that often impede the progress of such children.

She took them to the developmental pediatricians at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, one of the top U.S. providers of care for children with learning disabilities. They gave the boys many tests. They diagnosed mixed expressive/receptive language disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, dysgraphia (a writing disability) and dyslexia (a reading disability).

The doctors told Brockman that her sons need to be in small classes with research-based reading instruction and intensive math and language remediation. As the law requires, administrators at Potomac Landing Elementary School set up an individualized education program (IEP) team, which meets with Brockman.

As sometimes happens, these meetings have not gone well, Brockman said. Learning disability issues appear to be one of the greatest sources of friction between parents and schools. Brockman's account reveals how clumsy educators can be in communicating to parents what they are doing with their children, and why.

Both boys have IEPs, Brockman said in an e-mail, but the team chairperson dismissed some Kennedy Krieger assessments, "saying that all of KKI's reports say the kids are dysgraphic and dyslexic, thus suggesting that the reports have little or no validity."

Xenia Chan and Hedy Bok:

Professional letter writers were once a common sight on Hong Kong's streets, but today only a few survive. In the latest episode of our Uniquely Hong Kong series, we talk to Pun Tse-ching about the dying art
Pun Tse-ching, 73, performs a role which is dying out in Hong Kong. He is a professional Chinese letter writer.

As is that case with so many other industries, the rise of modern technology, coupled with higher rates of literacy, have led to a sharp fall in the number of letter writers.

Once they performed a vital role in Chinese society. During the 1950s, for example, they were needed because Hong Kong only had a literacy rate of about 60 per cent.

A professional letter writer or "se seun lou" (寫信佬) writes formal letters for customers in Chinese characters. These can include business letters or correspondence to family and friends abroad.Usually well-educated and highly literate, they were skilled in writing and performed the role of professional secretary. As well as writing letters, they also had to read letters to their customers.

Emma Brown:

Johnathon Carrington grew up on the sixth floor of a low-income D.C. apartment complex, a building most recently in the news for a drive-by shooting that injured 13.

His parents told him early on that education could be his escape, and Carrington took them at their word. He graduated Friday as the valedictorian of his neighborhood school, Dunbar High, and against all odds is headed to Georgetown University.

But Carrington, 17, is nervous, and so are his parents. What if Dunbar -- where truancy is chronic and fewer than one-third of students are proficient in reading -- didn't prepare him for the rigors of college? What if he isn't ready?

"I don't think I'm going to fail everything," Carrington said. "But I think I'm going to be a bit behind."

It's a valid concern. Past valedictorians of low-performing District high schools say their own transitions to college were eye-opening and at times ego-shattering, filled with revelations that -- despite taking their public schools' most difficult classes and acing them -- they were not equipped to excel at the nation's top colleges.

When these students arrived on campuses filled with students from high-flying suburban public schools and posh privates, they found a world vastly different from the one they knew in their urban high schools.

For Sache Collier, it meant writing her first research paper. For Darryl Robinson, it meant realizing that professors expected original ideas, not just regurgitated facts. For Angelica Wardell, who grew up going to school almost exclusively with African American students, it meant taking classes with whites and Asians.

Karl Dommershausen:

I started out against the voucher program in Wisconsin, even organizing a letter from the Janesville School Board to our lawmakers opposing this effort. Later, I decided to research vouchers/charters and their tax credits/scholarships to understand them better. I didn't study existing private schools, unless they were involved with vouchers.

Gov. Tommy Thompson started Wisconsin's voucher system in 1990 in Milwaukee. It has grown, and other programs have emerged throughout the country. With thousands of voucher programs in 20 states, solid evidence for evaluation should exist. From Florida's scholarship programs, Texas' charter schools, Indiana and Louisiana's charter-to-voucher adjustments, Tennessee's Muslim question, and other adaptations, I searched for answers. Surprisingly, very little documentation of results exists, and what is available appears to be selectively picked.

Private companies and their associations have created the "mantra of choice and competition" for the impoverished, challenged and underperforming. This method focuses on the hopes and fears of parents. It also labels public schools and teachers as culprits, while ignoring social-economic factors, dwindling funding, or lack of parental involvement and responsibility.

Barabara Miner:

When Gwen Moore walked into Milwaukee's North Division High School in September 1965, she was terrified.

"North was seen as this jungle," she explains more than 40 years later. "All black, segregated, inferior."

Moore had wanted to attend West Division high School, a "white" school closer to home. When she tried to register at West, school officials told her she had to go to North Division. (It would be another decade before the federal courts would order the desegregation of Milwaukee's schools.)

"My mom was in Texas at a Baptist convention, and I talked to her and said, 'Mom, they wouldn't let me go to West,' " Moore remembers.

"Gerrymandering," her mom muttered.

"Gerry who?" Moore asked.

Eric Evenchick:

Succeeding in most engineering courses is a matter of memorizing material and passing an exam. Some courses will have lab exercises, but most of these boil down to following a predefined list of instructions as closely as possible, and collecting the highly predictable results.

To me, engineering is about applying knowledge to solve problems. Memorizing equations wont help you much with this, nor will repeating a list of steps. To get experience solving problems, you need real problems to solve.

This is where engineering student teams come in. These teams usually operate as extracurriculars, with only a handful of students participating.

These teams tackle problems that range from building a race car to designing nano-robotics. They need support with everything from software development to business and fundraising. My experience with student teams has been the most valuable part of my undergraduate education.

Simon Parry:

The strangeness of English Schools Foundation teacher Chris Taylor's quest to visit every mainland province dawned on him as he sat down on a bench in a town square in Ningxia - an obscure northwestern chunk of China most foreigners have never heard of, let alone considered visiting.
Alone and nearly 2,000 kilometres away from his family in Hong Kong and his job as head of senior school at Sha Tin College, the 43-year-old suddenly found himself surrounded by a throng of locals. "They just sat really close to me and stared and stared," he recalls.

"As soon as I did anything like get my notebook out, everyone would be really interested and lean over and stare. I distinctly remember just wanting to be left alone and sitting there doing nothing until people finally dispersed and gave me a bit of space."

Being the object of intense curiosity is an experience Taylor relived in different ways throughout 10 years visiting all 27 provinces and five autonomous regions of the mainland, an adventure recounted in his newly published book, Riding the Dragon.

Paul Bucheit:

The Census Bureau has reported that 15% of Americans live in poverty. A shocking figure. But it's actually much worse. Inequality is spreading like a shadowy disease through our country, infecting more and more households, and leaving a shrinking number of financially secure families to maintain the charade of prosperity.

1. Almost half of Americans had NO assets in 2009

Analysis of Economic Policy Institute data shows that Mitt Romney's famous 47 percent, the alleged 'takers,' have taken nothing. Their debt exceeded their assets in 2009.

2. It's Even Worse 3 Years Later

Since the recession, the disparities have continued to grow. An OECD report states that "inequality has increased by more over the past three years to the end of 2010 than in the previous twelve," with the U.S. experiencing one of the widest gaps among OECD countries. The 30-year decline in wages has worsened since the recession, as low-wage jobs have replaced formerly secure middle-income positions.

3. Based on wage figures, half of Americans are in or near poverty.

The IRS reports that the highest wage in the bottom half of earners is about $34,000. To be eligible for food assistance, a family can earn up to 130% of the federal poverty line, or about $30,000 for a family of four.

Even the Census Bureau recognizes that its own figures under-represent the number of people in poverty. Its Supplemental Poverty Measure increases, by 50%, the number of Americans who earn between one-half and two times the poverty threshold.

Jay Matthews:

Anyone involved with schools has noticed that many governors, legislators and school boards think business practices can improve education. There is little proof of this. It's a fad. If we leave it alone, it will go away.

But sometimes the latest business idea is too foolish to ignore. Take, for instance, this recent commentary piece in Education Week, "We Need a New Approach to Principal Selection," by Ronald J. and Bill J. Bonnstetter.

"Identifying an effective principal requires a clear vision of the job duties, expectations and required personal attributes," they wrote. "While most selection committees would agree with these criteria, the present selection system ends up being filled with personal biases and status quo mentalities. That's why we recommend using benchmarking."

Ronald Bonnstetter is professor emeritus of science education at the University of Nebraska. He now works as senior vice president of research and development for his brother Bill, chairman of Target Training International, a private company that does human behavior and skill assessments for businesses and groups in 90 countries. The Bonnstetters know much about business and education, but they fail in this piece to consider the importance of finding out how well principal candidates have done with students.

Kris Hundley & Kendall Taggert:

Across the nation, hundreds of charities take your donations in the name of cancer patients, dying children and homeless veterans. But the real beneficiaries are the charity founders themselves and the for-profit companies they pay to run boiler rooms that dial for dollars. To tell the stories of America's worst charities, reporters reviewed thousands of charities and charted their finances going back a decade. These charities use deception, and in some cases outright lies, to persuade donors to give. Then they spend as much as 90 cents of every dollar raised to generate more donations. Regulators have proven powerless to stop the cycle of waste and deceit.

Michael Alison Chandler:

My mother, Rebecca Worthen Chandler, was named Teacher of the Year at a charter school in North Carolina where she teaches English, bringing an unexpectedly buoyant end to what has been one of the toughest years of her 36-year career.

The award "floored" her, she said, because by the last day of school, all she could think about was what she wished she had accomplished. She didn't give personal feedback on all her students' papers. She wasn't able to set up individual writing conferences for everyone. She never made it to the games.

"You know in 'Alice in Wonderland,' where the Queen says she thinks about six impossible things before breakfast?" she said. "I feel like teachers do six impossible things and probably don't have breakfast."

For most of her career, she taught middle-school English at a private girls school in Shaker Heights, Ohio, where class sizes were small and college ambition was assumed, and where she was able to make a first-rate education affordable for my sisters and me (and to be our eighth-grade English teacher.)

Valerie Strauss:

The Supreme Court will soon hand down its verdict in a case that challenges racial preferences in admissions at the University of Texas. In this post, Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the nonprofit public policy research organization The Century Foundation, and a proponent of class-based affirmative action in higher education admissions, looks at the issue. This appeared on the foundation's blog.

By Richard Kahlenberg
Sherrilyn A. Ifill, the president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund Inc., just wrote a New York Times op-ed in defense of race-based affirmative action. The future direction of such policies is likely to be decided at some time in the next two weeks when the U.S. Supreme Court issues its ruling in a challenge to racial preferences in the case of Fisher v. University of Texas.
In particular, Ifill is concerned that "an alarming number of scholars, pundits and columnists--many of them liberal--have declared that economic class, not race, should be the appropriate focus of university affirmative-action efforts." As a longtime proponent of class-based affirmative action (author of a 1996 book, "The Remedy: Class, Race and Affirmative Action," coauthor a 2012 Century Foundation report, "A Better Affirmative Action: State Universities that Created Alternatives to Racial Preferences") and a liberal, to boot, let me explain why I disagree with the four central arguments Ifill advances in favor of racial preference policies.

David Luhnow:

You can spot them prowling the streets of Mexico City's wealthy enclaves in sports cars. The guys wear their hair slicked back and designer shirts with the top three buttons open. The women have expensive bags and sunglasses. They are nearly always followed by a black SUV packed with armed bodyguards.

They are known in Mexico as "Juniors"--the sons and daughters of the country's elite, young people whose love of brand names is surpassed only by their sense of entitlement. Juniors grow up to dominate the upper echelons of business and politics. They live behind high walls, travel in private jets and seem utterly untouchable--and out of touch in a country that struggles with poverty and violence.

For the first time, though, Mexico's Juniors are coming under fire. In April, Andrea Benitez, the daughter of a well-connected politician, turned up at a trendy restaurant in Mexico City without a reservation and threw a fit when she was not given the table she wanted. So she called inspectors at Profeco, the government's consumer protection agency--which happened to be run by her father. Inspectors promptly shut down the restaurant.

John Sunyer:

Here's some advice for bibliophiles with teetering piles of books and not enough hours in the day: don't read them. Instead, feed the books into a computer program and make graphs, maps and charts: it is the best way to get to grips with the vastness of literature. That, at least, is the recommendation of Franco Moretti, a 63-year-old professor of English at Stanford University and unofficial leader of a band of academics bringing a science-fiction thrill to the science of fiction.

For centuries, the basic task of literary scholarship has been close reading of texts. But for digitally savvy academics such as Moretti, literary study doesn't always require scholars actually to read books. This new approach to literature depends on computers to crunch "big data", or stores of massive amounts of information, to produce new insights.

Who, for example, would have guessed that, according to a 2011 Harvard study of four per cent (that is, five million) of all the books printed in English, less than half the number of words used are included in dictionaries, the rest being "lexical dark matter"? Or that, as a recent study using the same database carried out by the universities of Bristol, Sheffield and Durham reveals, "American English has become decidedly more 'emotional' than British English in the last half-century"?

Doug Erickson:

Myles Strong didn't want to be noticed in middle school.
He kept to himself and never spoke in class. He wore bland polo shirts to avoid drawing anyone's eyes.

"The Myles in middle school would not recognize this person. He'd think this was an alternate version of himself," Strong, 19, said of himself Thursday at Madison East High School, where he is one of 360 seniors graduating Friday. La Follette High School also holds commencement exercises Friday, and ceremonies for Memorial and West are scheduled for Saturday.

High school is meant to stretch and push students. Strong's transformation was particularly pronounced, faculty members say, turning a wallflower into a confident leader.

"This is one top-notch young man here," East Principal Mary Kelley said Thursday when she ran into him in a school hallway.

Kelley was Strong's principal at Black Hawk Middle School. By coincidence, they transitioned together to East four years ago.
Strong was so shy at Black Hawk he wouldn't give his opinions in public, Kelley said. Strong puts it more pointedly: "I was living inside myself."

Retired Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman:

The first speech was at a family dinner following that graduation ceremony 44 years ago. My father told me the most important thing to remember was to choose my career carefully. He said that I should do something I loved because 40 years is a long time doing something you don't like or you don't care about.

That's Lesson #2: "Work is a 4-letter word," my father said, "but so is the word play. Find a job that brings playful joy every day and you'll never work a day in your life." Not that it hasn't had its ups and downs, but being an educator has been a labor of love for me, and I'm thankful that I followed my father's advice. Now it's your turn to find your own labor of love.

My mother then said, "Not so fast, young man," as she leaned over, elbowing my father lovingly in the process. "It's not all about enjoying yourself," she said. "It's not all about you--that's selfish and useless." She insisted, "Find something that will make the world a better place than you found it." Although my mother was not a camper, and never saw an insect that she didn't run from, she believed in the good camper rule. "Always leave your campsite better than you found it," and she preached it constantly.

That's Lesson #3: Make a positive difference for others. When you look back at your life, you won't be proud of the money you made or the stuff you've accumulated or even the fun times you had for yourself. No, you'll look back and be most proud of what you did for others. You will feel your life was worth living because you made the world a better place for others. Then, my mother told me to stop chewing with my mouth open and to save room for dessert, and the speeches were over.

Alan Borsuk:

Time, time, time, see what's become of Oconomowoc High School.

The nearly 1,500-student high school 30 miles west of Milwaukee attracted a lot of attention a year ago with a transformation plan: Reduce the staff, give most teachers increased workloads and pay, and implement learning approaches that call for more initiative by students and a lot of technology.

As Superintendent Patricia Neudecker (now retired) and high school Principal Joseph Moylan saw it, it was a way to tighten spending while personalizing and improving learning. As critics, including many teachers and students, saw it, it was a way to make things worse.

One year into the new reality, Oconomowoc High still stands. The critics haven't been proved wrong, but it appears it was a pretty decent year by many measures. Change did not derail the basic flow of a healthy, energetic school and in some ways it helped. But there are signs of the stress the approach is putting on all involved, and change does not come easily.

With a bow to Simon and Garfunkel ("Hazy Shade of Winter," of course), consider this an update focused on time, time, time.

Teachers' time: For about a decade, the high school has used a block schedule, which means the school day is built around four longer periods rather than six or seven periods. The conventional teaching load in such a situation is three blocks a day. Many Oconomowoc teachers now teach all four blocks, which means they are in front of students just about all day.

Neudecker said the change was made to reduce staff and save money without reducing offerings to students. "We haven't cut one program," she said. "We have not increased our class size."

In exchange for the heavier workload, teachers receive an additional $14,000 a year. For those affected, that has raised salaries to $50,000 at the starting level and $70,000 or more for experienced teachers.

Thomas Lindsay:

Higher education is reeling. A recent study demonstrates that a third of colleges and universities are now financially unstable through overbuilding, over-borrowing, and over-diversifying. But the good news is there are schools not only surviving but prospering in these harsh times.

This good news comes from ARAMARK Higher Education's Presidential Perspectives Series, a national forum authored by college and university presidents. Its Responding to the Commoditization of Higher Education includes an article by Michael MacDowell, president of Pennsylvania's Misericordia University. MacDowell traces the historical roots of the higher-education crisis. Key to how we got to this point was society's decision that nearly all should attend college, which raised costs for taxpayers. Moreover, with more-universal admissions, greater numbers of entering-college students find themselves "not ready for the experience," leading them to drop out (often with student-loan debt) or to "take many years to graduate, thereby increasing the cost to taxpayers, themselves, and their families." Simply put, with rising access, costs increased while student success fell.

Chris Callison-Burch:

Omar F. Zaidan, a Jordanian citizen, was denied re-entry to the US on the eve of his PhD defense at Johns Hopkins University. It has been over a year and a half, and he has not yet been allowed to return. This is madness. Omar is exactly the type of person who the US should be actively recruiting to come to the country. Here is a shortlist of reasons why:

• The US government invested approximately $200,000 in Omar's education through DARPA grants that paid for his tuition and his PhD stipend.
• Omar had accepted a job at Microsoft Research in Seattle, where he would have repaid his moral debt to the country many times over by paying taxes on his high salary, and through his intellectual contributions to the US tech industry.
• Omar is the best PhD student who I have supervised in the 6 years that I have been a computer science professor. Omar's research into computational linguistics and Arabic dialects has implications for national defense as well as for the technology sector.
• Omar is a model Muslim. Omar perfectly assimilated into US culture, while being proud of his own culture and religion. He made efforts to be an ambassador for Islam, patiently explaining aspects of his religion (like fasting at Ramadan) to his friends and classmates.

Pat Schneider:

Fresh off a two-month tour to observe the operations of all 48 schools, various programs, and the Madison School District's central administrative offices, Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham is promising to "ensure accountability at every level."
Accountability as Cheatham describes it will include student achievement on standardized tests of the type that current school reform movements emphasize, but will go far beyond that to a new understanding of educators' roles, the support they need to master them, and refined local measures of progress, she said.

"I worry that people perceive accountability as standardized test results, for example, and what I'm talking about is accountability for everybody playing well the function they are best positioned for in the service of children learning well," Cheatham told me Thursday in an interview. "Educators at every level of the system lack clarity on what that particular function is for them."http://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2013/06/deja_vu_a_focus.phpAccountability was one of five priority areas Cheatham identified in anEntry Plan Report released Wednesday. The others are: well-rounded, culturally responsive instruction; personal educational pathways for students; attracting, developing and retaining top-level talent; and engaging families and community members as partners.

Rob Reich:

The backlash against MOOCs and online learning in higher education has begun. Philosophers at San Jose State University recently wrote an open letter to Harvard's Michael Sandel, explaining why they were declining to support the use of his acclaimed class, Justice, in an online format provided by edX, an online course platform created jointly by Harvard and MIT. "There is no pedagogical problem in our department that JusticeX solves," they wrote.

Moving beyond Sandel's class to MOOCs of all kinds, they broadly rejected "products that will replace professors, dismantle departments, and provide a diminished education for students in public universities."
The letter is an exceptional document, articulating with welcome clarity several distinct objections and concerns. In considering the future of higher education in an era of MOOCs and the expansion of online learning, these objections and concerns are worthy of widespread attention and debate.

The Economist:

ASK a researcher what annoys him most about scientific publishing, and slowness will come near the top of the list of gripes. It takes nearly six months, on average, for a manuscript to wend its way from submission to publication. Worse, before a paper is accepted by a journal, it is often rejected by one or more others. The reason need not be a fatal flaw in the research; sometimes the work is simply not splashy enough for outlets high up in the pecking order. But in the process, each journal's editors send the paper for peer review--appraisal by experts in the relevant field--in much the way that each prospective purchaser of a house commissions his own survey. And, unlike those multiple, parallel surveys, the reviewers do not even get paid for their efforts.

Some publishers are at last beginning to twig that this is an awful waste of resources. Last month a number of them, including big ones like the Wellcome Trust, BioMed Central (BMC), the Public Library of Science (PLoS) and the European Molecular Biology Organisation, said they would give authors of papers they reject the option of making referees' reports available to the other publishers.

Joe Leahy:

A series of student protests against bus fare rises in São Paulo have turned increasingly violent, bringing chaos to the centre of South America's largest city and highlighting discontent with inflation in Brazil.

Police fired rubber bullets and tear gas to stop protesters occupying the city's main thoroughfare, Avenida Paulista, disrupting evening traffic and leaving office workers stuck in their buildings. There were similar clashes in Rio de Janeiro and Porto Alegre in Brazil's south.

In Sâo Paulo, 232 people were detained and 12 officers hurt, police said, while figures for the number of protesters injured were not yet available. "There were [tear gas] bombs landing on all sides," said a protester, Bruna Gisi Martins de Almeirda, a student at the University of São Paulo. "I took one [rubber] bullet in the leg and one in the arm."

The intensity and violence of the protests, which follow those in Turkey and were dubbed by one economist as Brazil's "tropical spring", are uncommon for a country that has enjoyed a decade of economic growth and represent a new challenge for President Dilma Rousseff.

Motoko Rich

With school districts rushing to buy computers, tablets, digital white boards and other technology, a new report questions whether the investment is worth it.

In a review of student survey data conducted in conjunction with the federal exams known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the nonprofit Center for American Progress found that middle school math students more commonly used computers for basic drills and practice than to develop sophisticated skills. The report also found that no state was collecting data to evaluate whether technology investments were actually improving student achievement.

"Schools frequently acquire digital devices without discrete learning goals and ultimately use these devices in ways that fail to adequately serve students, schools, or taxpayers," wrote Ulrich Boser, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and the author of the report. The analysis of the N.A.E.P. data found that 34 percent of eighth graders who took the math exams in 2011 used computers to "drill on math facts" while less than a quarter worked with spreadsheets or geometric figures on the computer. Only 17 percent used statistical programs.

The federal survey data showed striking differences among racial groups and income levels. More than half of the black students who took the eighth-grade math exam in 2011 said they used computers to work on math drills, while only 30 percent of white students said they did. Similarly, 41 percent of students eligible for free and reduced lunches said they used computers for math drills, compared with 29 percent of students whose families earn too much for them to qualify for the lunches. In high school science classrooms, the use of technology evidently has not advanced much past the 1980s. According to the report, 73 percent of students who took the 12th-grade National Assessment science exam said they regularly watched a movie or video in class.

Such data, Mr. Boser said, suggested that technology "doesn't seem to have dramatically changed the nature of schooling." Experts who study the effectiveness of instructional technology say there is potential for some digital programs to improve teaching. John Pane, a senior scientist at the RAND Corporation, said good technology allowed students to work at their own pace and independently while teachers worked with smaller groups.

Mr. Pane conducted a study, financed by the federal Department of Education, of an algebra software program created by Carnegie Learning, a math curriculum developer. He found that high school students who used the program, which was designed to accompany a teacher-led curriculum, showed gains on their state-standardized math tests that were nearly double the gains of a typical year's worth of growth using a more traditional high school math curriculum.

Whether those gains came from the use of technology or changes in the curriculum, he said, was hard to say. But Steve Ritter, chief scientist at Carnegie Learning, said one of the benefits of the technology was that it used the principles of cognitive science to help students gain a deeper understanding of concepts rather than simply drill math problems. "We're not just seeing whether they got the answer right or wrong," Mr. Ritter said, "but why they got it right or wrong."

Laura Waters:

Take over Camden Public Schools! Reform tenure and evaluate teachers and principals on student growth data! Strengthen and expand charter schools! Enact a school voucher bill!
Education reformers in New Jersey and elsewhere sure do love radical change, seven-league strides towards the imagined Bethlehem of high-achieving schools accessible to all children. We've no patience for baby-steps that gingerly transverse the mired ruts of the status quo, no time for triangulated compromises that slap a coat of paint on failing schools and call it an improvement.

But sometimes meaningful change does occur incrementally. This is hard to hear for die-hard reformers. But one particular Jersey-grown school reform measure argues for a gradual approach: the state's Interdistrict Public School Choice Program.

Peter Crosta:

This paper examines the relationship between community college enrollment patterns and two successful student outcomes--credential completion and transfer to a four-year institution. It also introduces a new way of visualizing the various attendance patterns of community college students. Patterns of enrollment intensity (full-time or part-time status) and continuity (enrolling in consecutive terms or skipping one or more terms) are graphed and then clustered according to their salient features.
Using data on cohorts of first-time community college students at five colleges in a single state, the author finds that, over an 18-semester period, 10 patterns of attendance account for nearly half the students. Among the remaining students who persisted, there is astounding variation in their patterns of enrollment. Clustering these patterns reveals two relationships: the first is a positive association between enrollment continuity and earning a community college credential, and the second is a positive association between enrollment intensity and likelihood of transfer.

Stephanie Simon:

Several students from northeast Texas said they plan to file a federal complaint on Wednesday accusing their school districts of cruel and unusual punishment by prosecuting them in criminal court for missing school or being late for class.

The civil rights complaint, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters, is directed at school districts in Dallas and three other communities.

The districts funnel truancy cases to a special court system that prosecuted more than 36,000 cases and collected $2.9 million in fines last year from students convicted of multiple unexcused absences or tardy arrivals, according to the complaint.

Students as young as 12 can be arrested and handcuffed at school. Once they turn 17, they can be jailed for failing to pay past fines, which can run into thousands of dollars, according to the complaint, which was drafted by the National Center for Youth Law and advocacy groups Texas Appleseed and Disability Rights Texas.

"I'm getting treated like a criminal," Ashley Brown, 16, one of the complainants, told Reuters late on Monday. She said she had been erroneously sent to truancy court for four excused absences after her grandmother's death.

Steve Prestegard:

The new money added to the K-12 system by 2010 equaled $4,714/pupil. Given public school enrollment of 872,000 students that year, Wisconsin taxpayers had provided public schools with a spending windfall of more than $4.1 billion a year by the time Governor Walker took office. So much for being "oblivious."

Wisconsin journalists have failed to report this history. Further, they have failed to explain adequately that much of the new spending has not reached the classroom. Instead, it has gone to pension, health care, and other fringe benefits. Where such costs once equaled about a quarter of teacher salaries, in many school districts that share now exceeds fifty per cent. In the Milwaukee Public Schools, the meteoric rise in fringe benefits is the principal reason for reductions in education programming that have been part of recent budgets. ...

The overall journalistic failure has predictable consequences when it comes to public opinion. In scientific polling, scholars at Harvard University have found that the public is clueless when it comes to public school spending and levels of teacher compensation.

These scholars have reported their findings in the respected journal Education Next. They find that the average citizen has a "wildly inaccurate" understanding of school finance. For example, "...[w]e asked respondents to estimate average per-pupil expenditures within their local school district and the average teacher salaries in their states...[W]e discovered that those surveyed, on average, underestimated per-pupil expenditures by more than half and teacher salaries by roughly 30 percent..."

Wisconsin Senator Tim Cullen:

Last week, I expressed my extreme disappointment when the budget-writing Joint Finance Committee voted along party lines to create a statewide unaccountable school voucher program.

Make no mistake - this plan creates two separate school systems in Wisconsin, both paid for by taxpayers.

In 1954, late Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Earl Warren said, "Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." His words hold true today.

While the agreement creates a 500-student cap during the program's first year and a 1,000-student cap in subsequent years, the cap could be lifted in the future or may be line-item vetoed by the governor. The ultimate goal of voucher supporters is not to open the voucher program to 500 or 1,000 students, but an unrestricted expansion of vouchers.

The private school voucher effort is a political movement, not an educational movement. It is a top-down movement funded by tens of millions of dollars in out-of-state campaign contributions and the hiring of several highly-paid lobbyists.

Important Press Conference - Can You Make It? - http://t.co/8VlrPf2rMD

— Madison Teachers Inc (@MtiMadison) June 15, 2013

DPI Superintendent, Tony Evers, and legislators who want to maintain Wisconsin's proud system of public education, are holding a press conference on Monday, June 17 at 10 AM in the Assembly Parlor to address the recent decision by the Joint Committee on Finance to expand voucher funding at the expense of public schools. The Senate and Assembly will be voting to pass this extreme budget within weeks. Please join these folks to inform and educate the public about the negative impact that private school voucher expansion will have on Wisconsin's public schools. Wear Red for Public Ed. We need a wall of support behind the speakers. Time is running short to stop this train wreck but we cannot allow our opposition to go unnoticed!

TIME / LOCATION: 10 am in the Assembly Parlor with Superintendent Tony Evers.

The Madison School Board discussed the renewal of Administrator contracts (500K PDF) during their June 10, 2013 meeting (video, about 50 minutes into the meeting). Listen via this 5mb mp3 audio.

The timing and length of administrator contracts along with substantive reviews is not a new subject:

February, 2006: Are Administrators Golden?

Lawrie Kobza pointed out last night that 2-year rolling administrative contracts may be important for some groups of administrators and that the School Board should consider that issue. Otherwise, if the annual pattern continues, extensions will occur in February before the School Board looks at the budget and makes their decisions about staffing. Even though the Superintendent has indicated what positions he proposes to eliminate for next year, when the School Board has additional information later in the budget year, they may want to make different decisions based upon various tradeoffs they believe are important for the entire district.

What might the School Board consider doing? Develop criteria to use to identify/rank your most "valuable" administrative positions (perhaps this already exists) and those positions where the district might be losing its competitive edge. Identify what the "at risk" issues are - wages, financial, gender/racial mix, location, student population mix. Or, start with prioritizing rolling two-year contracts for one of the more "important," basic administrative groups - principals. Provide the School Board with options re administrative contracts. School board members please ask for options for this group of contracts.

Ms. Kobza commented that making an extension of contracts in February for this group of staff could make these positions appear to be golden, untouchable. Leaving as is might not be well received in Madison by a large number of people, including the thousands of MMSD staff who are not administrators on rolling two-year contracts nor a Superintendent with a rolling contract (without a horizon, I think). The board might be told MMSD won't be able to attract talented administrators. I feel the School Board needs to publicly discuss the issues and risks to its entire talent pool.

Mr. Nadler reported that MMSD might be losing its edge in the area of administration. He gave one example where there more than a few applicants for an elementary school position (20 applicants); however, other districts, such as Sun Prairie, are attracting more applicants (more than 100). The communities surrounding Madison are becoming more attractive over time as places to live and to do business. If we don't recognize and try to understand the issues, beyond simply wages and benefits, the situation will continue to worsen. I feel the process in place needs to change in order to be a) more responseive to the issues, b) more flexible for the School Board in their decisionmaking processes, especially around budget time.

Questions that are not clear to me include: a) is a two-year rolling contract required for all administrators, b) what is the difference between non-renewal and extension of a contract - is the end of January date really an extension?, c)is there a Board policy - if not, does one need to be developed, d) are there options open to the School Board to hold on one-year contract extensions due to upcoming cuts to the budget, e) how can changes be made by moving/retraining staff if needed, and f) can grant money being used to pay for administrators be used in other ways (not including grant oversight/accounting? We're in the same spot as the past two years - not talking about administrator contracts until one week or so before a deadline.

I feel this information needs to be clear and to be transparent to all employees, the board and the community. I believe a multi-year staffing strategy as part of a multi-year strategic plan is important to have, especially given the critical nature of the district's resources. This idea is not proposed as a solution to the public school's financial situation - not at all, that's not the point.

Additional administrator contract links, here.

It is ironic, in my view, that there has not been much change in the District's administration from the Rainwater era....

Amy Li:

Days after dozens of Hubei teachers were attacked by angry students whose attempts at cheating on China's highly competitive national college entrance exam were foiled, the nation is struggling to understand what exactly went wrong.

Shocked by the violence, many students and parents have urged an immediate overhaul of the gaokao, a system known to drill students into testing-taking machines.

The attack happened on Saturday afternoon outside a school in Hubei's Zhongxiang city. After the exam, students besieged teachers who had reportedly imposed strict measures and stopped students from cheating.

Students and parents block teachers from leaving the Hubei school after the exam. Photo: Screenshot via WeiboMore than 50 teachers from outside Zhongxiang had been assigned to invigilate the exam on purpose, said media reports. Of those, two were attacked.

Laurie Rogers:

"Culture of Power": That's what a parent recently called the prevailing attitude in the local school district. It's an apt description. Power is what people in public education know, and power is what they crave. In any culture of power, dissenters are seen as the problem and dealt with accordingly.

I'm privileged to know some teachers and staff members who care deeply about the children and who work hard to do what's best for them. But there are many, many others whose interests begin and end with themselves and with their own economic/political/social agenda. Conversing with these self-interested people in a reasonable, intelligent way is impossible, a fruitless exercise. They want; they don't want. It's all they can see. Their logic is infantile and their perspective constricted and unyielding. With thin skins and fragile egos, it doesn't take much for them to start showing teeth and claws.

Public education has been infiltrated by a willfully ignorant, bureaucratic, obscenely expensive, narcissistic, dictatorial mob. The Edu Mob is an enterprise concerned with enriching, maintaining and expanding itself -- not with accountability, responsibility or transparency. Derelict in its duty to the children and morally bankrupt, the Edu Mob blames others, attacks dissenters, and finds creative ways to get more money (such as filing lawsuits; trading private student information for grants and other payments; and training children to support the enterprise without question).

Zahira Torres:

KayLynn McAbee is one of thousands of high school graduates across the state slated to take costly remedial courses that do not count toward her college degree.
But McAbee will not have to pay for the courses because of a new summer program developed by Denver Public Schools. The program, which will offer free remedial classes in math and English, is geared toward curbing the number of DPS graduates taking remedial courses in college.

"This will help a lot of students because they're not just remedial classes, they're also classes that will help kids be more confident in college," McAbee said.

District officials said they came up with the program after the release of a report earlier this year from the Colorado

A. David Dahmer:

The Mann Scholars Ceremony was celebrated at the Wisconsin Institute of Discovery Town Center on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus June 7.

"It's a thrill to welcome you all here today to celebrate our new Mann Scholars and our graduating seniors," said Madison Metropolitan School District Partnerships Coordinator Kathy Price. "The Madison Board of Education and our new [MMSD] Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham are extending their warmest wishes to you tonight and their sincere congratulations. For the Madison District, the Mann Scholars program represents one of our premiere collaboration of family, school, and community partners. This is one that has served as a model for additional scholarship programs that have been launched including the Sanchez Scholars and our the newest scholarship that we have launched -- the Reading Recovery Scholarship Program."

The Mann Educational Opportunity Fund is a scholarship that honors the late Bernard and Kathlyn Mann, long-time African American residents of Madison whose strong belief in education helped ensure the graduation of their five children from Madison Memorial High School and later from universities. The Mann Program's goal is to provide mentoring and educational tools to students from the Madison Metropolitan School District who show potential for academic achievement but face significant challenges to reaching their full potential.

Mann Scholars are picked every year based on their academic promise, their motivation, their financial need, and the willingness of their families to encourage participation in enrichment activities. They are primarily, but not exclusively, students of color.

a Simon Davies:

In a landmark ruling, Sweden's data protection authority (the Swedish Data Inspection Board) this week issued a decision that prohibits the nation's public sector bodies from using the cloud service Google Apps.

The ruling - which bans Google cloud products such as calendar services, email and data processing functions - is based on inadequacies in the Google contract. A risk assessment by the Board determined that the contract gives Google too much covert discretion over how data can be used, and that public sector customers are unable to ensure that data protection rights are protected.
The assessment gives several examples of this deficiency, including uncertainty over how data may be mined or processed by Google and lack of knowledge about which subcontractors may be involved in the processing. The assessment also concluded that there was no certainty about if or when data would be deleted after expiration of the contract.

Tyler Cowen:

"Early intervention" to benefit children is one of those sacred cows which I consider unproven and which also is cited in far too malleable a fashion. Here is a new paper by Alan Rushton, Margaret Grant, Julia Feast, and John Simmonds, probably gated for many of you, but worth a read if you can.

The abstract is too wordy, but the study is a follow-up on one hundred Chinese girls who first lived in Chinese orphanages, were later adopted into the UK, and who now are 40 to 50 years old. The orphanage involved deprivation and even some malnutrition (55% of sample). There was basic medical care and supervision, although no general one-to-one caregiver relationship.
Of the initial hundred children, 98 were still alive and 72 of those responded to the survey, which also involved extensive follow-up interviews.

Most entered the orphanage very early, in the first year of life, with a mean of three months old. Age at exit varied between eight months and 83 months, with a mean of 23 months, and with a mean of 20 months spent in the care of the orphanage.

Madison Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham (PDF):

Strengths

Overall Themes
Quality of teachers, principals, and central office staff: By and large, we have quality teachers, principals, support staff and central office staff who are committed to working hard on behalf of the children of Madison. With clarity of focus, support, and accountability, these dedicated educators will be able to serve our students incredibly well.

Commitment to action: Across the community and within schools, there is not only support for public education, but there is also an honest recognition of our challenges and an urgency to address them. While alarming gaps in student achievement exist, our community has communicated a willingness to change and a commitment to action.

Positive behavior: District-wide efforts to implement an approach to positive student behavior are clearly paying off. Student behavior is very good across the vast majority of schools and classrooms. Most students are safe and supported, which sets the stage for raising the bar for all students academically.

Promising practices: The district has some promising programs in place to challenge students academically, like our AVID/TOPS program at the middle and high school levels, the one-to-one iPad programs in several of our elementary schools, and our Dual Language Immersion programs. The district also does an incredibly successful job of inclusion and support of students with special needs. Generally, I've observed some of the most joyful and challenging learning environments I've ever seen.

Well-rounded education: Finally, the district offers a high level of access to the arts, sports, world language and other enriching activities that provide students with a well- rounded learning experience. This is a strength on which we can build.

"AVID is totally paying off. Kids, staff, everyone is excited about what it has brought to the school." - Staff member

"Positive Behavior Support has made a dramatic improvement in teaching and the behavior expected. We've seen big changes in kids knowing what is expected and in us having consistent, schoolwide expectations"
- Staff member

Challenges
Focus: Principals, teachers and students have been experiencing an ever-changing and expanding set of priorities that make it difficult for them to focus on the day-to-day work of knowing every child well and planning instruction accordingly. If we are going to be successful, we need to be focused on a clear set of priorities aimed at measurable goals, and we need to sustain this focus over time.

"One of the strengths of MMSD is that we will try anything. The problem is that we opt out just as easily as we opt in. We don't wait to see what things can really do."
- Staff member

Coherence: In order for students to be successful, they need
to experience an education that leads them from Pre-Kindergarten through 12th grade, systematically and seamlessly preparing them for graduation and postsecondary education. We've struggled to provide our teachers with the right tools, resources and support to ensure that coherence for every child.

Personalized Learning: We need to work harder than ever to keep students engaged through a relevant and personalized education at the middle and high school levels. We've struggled to ensure that all students have an educational experience that gives them a glimpse of the bright futures. Personalized learning also requires increased access to and integrated use of technology.

Priority Areas
To capture as many voices as accurately as possible, my entry plan included a uniquely comprehensive analysis process. Notes from more than 100 meetings, along with other handouts, emails, and resources, were analyzed and coded for themes by Research & Program Evaluation staff. This data has been used to provide weekly updates to district leadership, content for this report and information to fuel the internal planning process that follows these visits.

The listening and learning phase has led us to five major areas to focus our work going forward. Over the next month, we'll dive deeper into each of these areas to define the work, the action we need to take and how we'll measure our progress. The following pages outline our priorities, what we learned to guide us to these priorities and where we'll focus our planning in the coming month.

Much more on Madison's new Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham, here.

Jim Rutenberg:

As he walked the East Hampton High School campus on the last day of classes last week, Adam S. Fine seemed to be one satisfied principal. Graduating seniors were moving on to colleges including Brown and Cornell Universities; class-cutting was down; and Newsweek had ranked the school among the 2,000 best public schools in the nation, all to be expected in a ZIP code synonymous with success.
But, asked to reflect on the year that was, he sighed and moved his hand up and down, suggesting a roller coaster. "Resiliency," he said. "That's my theme word for graduation."

This has been a year like none other for East Hampton High, which faced an uncomfortable ethnic integration problem that had been festering in the background for years but was thrust to the foreground by a tragedy at the opening of the school year.

A 16-year-old junior from Ecuador, David Hernandez, hanged himself just a few days after homecoming in September; it was the second student suicide in three years. Two months later, a student who was about to transfer to the school committed suicide. Three suicides in three years in a school community of about 900 students is far above the regional average. And all of the students who killed themselves were Hispanic.

Motoko Rich:

David Javsicas, a popular seventh-grade reading teacher known for urging students to act out dialogue in the books they read in class, sometimes feels wistful for the days when he taught math.

A quiz, he recalls, could quickly determine which concepts students had not yet learned. Then, "you teach the kids how to do it, and within a week or two you can usually fix it," he said.

Helping students to puzzle through different narrative perspectives or subtext or character motivation, though, can be much more challenging. "It could take months to see if what I'm teaching is effective," he said.

Educators, policy makers and business leaders often fret about the state of math education, particularly in comparison with other countries. But reading comprehension may be a larger stumbling block.

Here at Troy Prep Middle School, a charter school near Albany that caters mostly to low-income students, teachers are finding it easier to help students hit academic targets in math than in reading, an experience repeated in schools across the country.

Students entering the fifth grade here are often several years behind in both subjects, but last year, 100 percent of seventh graders scored at a level of proficient or advanced on state standardized math tests. In reading, by contrast, just over half of the seventh graders met comparable standards.

Steve Norton:

The evidence is piling up that the Snyder administration was closely involved in the effort to construct an alternative "education" system whose top priority is to minimize public school costs, not improve education. According to emails obtained by the Detroit News, top advisers to Gov. Rick Snyder helped put the so-called "skunk works" group together or approved of its creation as early as September 2012.

From the parent perspective, one of the most disturbing discoveries was a statement by Gov. Snyder's chief of staff, Dennis Muchmore. "Frankly, there's nothing I enjoy more than seeing the education community in a fratz," Muchmore wrote not long after the "skunk works" story first broke.

Thousands of parents, educators, and other concerned citizens who care about quality public education expressed their outrage at the secrecy and narrow vision of the "skunk works" project. Since when did we become the enemy? What kind of distorted lens must members of the Snyder administration be using that they see in concerned parents an opponent to be overcome rather than a constituency to be heard?

Amy Yee:

In a simple classroom above a storefront on a bustling street, four young men crowded around the colorful innards of an open computer hard drive while their teacher explained in Hindi how it all worked.

The computer repair course was among 25 offerings at Gras Academy, a private institution with 58 skills training centers across India, including this one in Ghaziabad, a city on the outskirts of New Delhi.

Gras is one of a burgeoning number of private academies providing hands-on job training in India, filling a gap between government vocational centers and four-year universities. These schools -- which offer short, practical, nondegree programs -- have been growing since the early 2000s.

India has a vast population of young people, with more than half of its population of 1.2 billion younger than 25. It faces the immense challenge of harnessing this generation as a productive work force, or else facing the combustible prospect of hundreds of millions of unemployed youth in the future. The Indian government estimates that 500 million young people must be trained by 2022 and has made skills training a major policy issue.

Inderjeet Singh, 19, is a first-year student at a government college; but attendance there is not mandatory, giving him time to attend Gras's computer repair class. His college tuition is about 5,000 rupees, or less than $90, per year, but he is willing to pay 22,000 rupees for the six-month Gras course. He thinks it will be worth it, because 70 percent to 75 percent of Gras's graduates find jobs immediately, according to the academy.

Mathematics Stack Exchange:

My 13-year-old sister has a problem which, given the way math is currently taught, I doubt is anything but all too common. She has a low grade in her math course and only ever attempts to memorize formulas and tricks, but never actually learn any of the reasoning behind the math. Cross multiplication is the perfect example.
She knows that from

35=x10

.. she can "cross multiply" to get

30=5x

.. and from there get x=6. She has absolutely no idea what any of this means, however. She's simply memorized a pattern and is applying that pattern to a recognizable arrangement of numbers.

Elizabeth Hong:

Is the college admissions process fair? That's been the question of this year's college admission season, with articles like Suzy Lee Weiss's Wall Street Journal Op-Ed "To (All) the Colleges That Rejected Me" and the Fisher v. University of Texas Supreme Court case challenging race-based Affirmative Action. As a recent high school graduate from a private school in New York, I have thought much about this topic.

I first read Weiss's piece when it was published in March. Since then, it has gone viral and has received a mostly negative response, with Weiss criticized for having a sense of white entitlement (See "To (All) the White Girls Who Didn't Get Into The College of Their Dreams"). Weiss was lucky enough to get into some of the Big 10 schools, including the University of Michigan and Penn State, but was upset she did not get into more elite schools. She felt discriminated against for being Caucasian. In herWall Street Journal editorial, she wrote, "What could I have done differently over the past years? For starters, had I known two years ago what I know now, I would have gladly worn a headdress to school. Show me to any closet and I would've happily come out of it. 'Diversity!'...If it were up to me, I would've been any of the diversities: Navajo, Pacific Islander, anything. Sen."

Leslie T. Fenwick:

The truth can be used to tell a lie. The truth is that black parents' frustration with the quality of public schools is at an all time righteous high. Though black and white parents' commitment to their child's schooling is comparable, more black parents report dissatisfaction with the school their child attends. Approximately 90 percent of black and white parents report attending parent teacher association meetings and nearly 80 percent of black and white parents report attending teacher conferences. Despite these similarities, fewer black parents (47 percent) than white parents (64 percent) report being very satisfied with the school their child attends. This dissatisfaction among black parents is so whether these parents are college-educated, high income, or poor.

The lie is that schemes like Teach For America, charter schools backed by venture capitalists, education management organizations (EMOs), and Broad Foundation-prepared superintendents address black parents concerns about the quality of public schools for their children. These schemes are not designed to cure what ails under-performing schools. They are designed to shift tax dollars away from schools serving black and poor students; displace authentic black educational leadership; and erode national commitment to the ideal of public education.

Consider these facts: With a median household income of nearly $75,000, Prince George's County is the wealthiest majority black county in the United States. Nearly 55 percent of the county's businesses are black-owned and almost 70 percent of residents own homes, according to the U.S. Census. One of Prince George's County's easternmost borders is a mere six minutes from Washington, D.C., which houses the largest population of college-educated blacks in the nation. In the United States, a general rule of thumb is that communities with higher family incomes and parental levels of education have better public schools. So, why is it that black parents living in the upscale Woodmore or Fairwood estates of Prince George's County or the tony Garden District homes up 16th Street in Washington D.C. struggle to find quality public schools for their children just like black parents in Syphax Gardens, the southwest D.C. public housing community?

Larry Cuban:

K-12 online instruction attracts policy-inclined school reformers and reform-minded policymakers because it appears as a technological and inexpensive solution for serious problems at a time when public schools are viewed as a double failure: in urban districts where largely poor and minority youth get a third-rate education and many suburban and rural schools that fall short of producing skilled and knowledgeable graduates who can contribute to a strong, competitive global economy.

Here is a brief list of those problems that promoters say will get solved through virtual instruction.

Traditional whole-class instruction. Teaching lessons to the whole group of 25-30 students at one time generation after generation has resulted in tedium and boredom for students who already know the content or are too far behind to grasp the lesson. It has been difficult for teachers with these size classes and district and state requirements to cover the curriculum to hit the sweet spot of learning that brings all students along at the same time.

David Cohen:

My last professional development experience occurred at a bar, with a pitcher of beer passed among participants at the table. Don't worry - no district funds were misspent. It was my second time joining an informal evening tweet-up (i.e., organized on Twitter) of Computer-Using Educators (CUE) in the San Francisco Bay Area. These gatherings go by hashtag #brewcue. There's an occasional afternoon version - same idea, more caffeinated - called #coffeecue, with gatherings popping up in a wider variety of locations.

I won't be able submit any paperwork from these experiences, won't be reimbursed or move up the pay scale - but I have benefitted from the experience. At my first #brewcue I talked with peers about how we manage paperless assignments and grading, and even had a chance to talk with someone working on the technical side of this matter, developing a product called Voice Comments. Then I heard about how different schools organize teacher time in different ways to promote technology integration. And then I listened in as two tech gurus shared their perspectives on how to make informed and cost-effective purchasing decisions that promote student learning and autonomy. And then I learned how students can use Minecraft in a variety of educational ways. As the parent of a California fourth-grader, I found the online California Mission Reports particularly interesting.

Ruthie:

Everyone is familiar with camera surveillance at banks, high-end stores, and office buildings. In a post-Newtown world, however, surveillance cameras are becoming increasingly familiar in neighborhood schools. In fact, after the tragedy in December, over 62 of the 400 bills relating to school safety nationwide, pertained to surveillance cameras.

Proponents argue that cameras in schools can be an efficient, minimally intrusive method of security. Unlike metal detectors or guards, cameras do not significantly impact the daily lives of students and teachers. Cameras are also more affordable than other forms of security. "They (schools) can now buy 10 cameras where they could afford two before, so they're becoming more mainstream," said Bob Stockwell, a global technology leader with Stanley Security.

Cameras are not only easily accessible, they are also able to provide sharper images and greater storage capacity, enabling footage that is easy to view, store, and share. This technology is considered a cutting edge way of keeping schools safer.

Sara Goldrick-Rab:

The only problem is that neither the chart or the accompanying article addresses the likely assumption of many readers: students who can't pay these costs, even by working, are "held harmless" through financial aid. For that reason, many say, we should simply raise tuition further and invest that additional revenue in financial aid distributed to the neediest students.

To evaluate that claim, let's take a look at the "net price" of attending UW-Madison and UW-comprehensives-- the cost paid by the poorest students after taking into account all grant/scholarship aid provided to offset the sticket price.

At UW-Madison, for the upcoming year 2013-2014, that amount is $13,635.00 for Pell recipients with no expected family contribution. As you can see in the chart above, that means students from families typically earning less than $30,000 a year are expected to either work 1,866 hours a year (~35 hours/week) or borrow around $68,000 (5 years is typical time-to-degree for these students at Madison). Is this a reasonable proposition?

In addition, consider that no more than say 3-4% of UW-Madison undergraduates come from this sort of family. After all, more than 85% of students do not receive any Pell at all. For those students, the net price is over $21,000 in the coming year (total cost in 2013-14i s $24,000). Redistribution is helping very, very well-- and many students with substantial need deliberately overlooked by the federal "needs analysis" are being left out in the cold. It's no wonder there's now backlash against our financial aid system-- there's universal need and a narrow means-tested system. Never works.

Pat Schneider:

How does an elementary school adjust to a steep and rapid rise in the number of poor children coming through its doors?

With programs to build language and technological literacy, resilient character, and ties to the community, says Brett Wilfrid, principal of Sandburg Elementary School, 4114 Donald Drive, on Madison's far east side.

"When people come and spend time in this school, they see a lot of happy children and adults. It is a wonderful, thriving community," Wilfrid told me in a phone interview Thursday.

I spoke with Wilfrid after a Cap Times data report published this week showed that Sandburg Elementary had the greatest increase in the Madison School District -- 34.3 percentage points -- in the number of children from low-income families in the past decade.

The percentage of low-income children, based on eligibility for free or reduced price lunch, rose from 37.9 percent of Sandburg enrollment in the 2003-2004 school year to 72.2 percent this year.

(One district evening program to help students who have left school to get their high school diplomas saw a slightly higher rate of increase, 35.4 percent, in the percentage of low-income students enrolled.)

Cliff Mass:

If I was a Seattle Public School parent, I would be getting angry now.

Why? Most Seattle students are receiving an inferior math education using math books and curriculum that will virtually insure they never achieve mastery in key mathematical subjects and thus will be unable to participate in careers that requires mathematical skills.

There are so many signs that a profound problem exists in this city. For example,
Parents see their kids unable to master basic math skills. And they bring home math books that are nearly indecipherable to parents or other potential tutors.

Nearly three quarters of Seattle Community College students require remediation in math.

Over one hundred Seattle students are not able to graduate high school because they could not pass state-mandated math exams.

Minority and economically disadvantaged students are not gaining ground in math.

Related:

• Connected Math
• Madison Math Forum Audio/Video

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

In Governor Walker's first legislative session, using the ruse that the State was millions in debt, he proposed eliminating collective bargaining for public employees as the means to fill in the alleged budget deficit. As he described it, he dropped the bomb.

Last week, another legislative session and another bomb. Walker's budget will hit education and educators once again. It is a giant step to privatize education. This is done by forcing pubic schools to pay tuition for children to attend religious and private schools by giving the parents of such children a voucher which forces the public school district to send money to the religious or private school. Walker and his right- wing legislators made vouchers available in every school district in the State. To this, UW Education Dean Julie Underwood said, "School Boards beware", that this is, "the model legislation disseminated by the pro-free market American Legislative Exchange Council's network of corporate members and conservative legislators to privatize education and erode local control." In criticizing the legislation, State Superintendent Tony Evers chided, "A voucher in every backpack."

Public school districts lose twice. Once by having to use money intended to educate children in their schools, and also losing State aid because they cannot count the child attending the religious or private school on which State aid is based. It is projected that this will cost MMSD $27 million over the next five years. Vouchers provide parents $4,000 per year for an elementary school student and $10,000 for a high school student. State Senator Jennifer Schilling calls it, "Vouchers on steroids!" Research shows that most voucher schools in Wisconsin underperform compared to their public school counterparts.

Ben Austin, via a kind email:

Parents, educators, and education advocates have a lot in common when it comes to a kids-first first agenda. But we can never seize that common ground if those with whom we disagree are deemed to be "evil" and sentenced to Hell, as you did last week in your now infamous blog post.

If we can't start from that basic premise, then we are no more mature than the children we endeavor to serve. We cannot purport to encourage tolerance and discourage bullying on the schoolyard if the adults in charge of the schoolyard can't adhere to those same basic principles.

For the past year, the organization for which I serve as executive director - Parent Revolution - has been working with parents from the Watts neighborhood community school Weigand Avenue Elementary to help turnaround their failing school. Although there appear to be some areas of improvement at the school, Weigand is currently ranked 15th worst of nearly 500 elementary schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), and has been on a continual overall downward slide for the past 3-4 years under its current school leadership.

Four years is a long time for parents to wait for improvements in a failing school, despite even the best of intentions from dedicated professionals like Weigand's current principal. Unfortunately, the current principal was unable to make the progress needed to turnaround the school.

In 2011 many of these same parents petitioned along with Weigand's teachers to oust their failed principal, but had no real power to force change, and the principal retained her job. Every teacher who signed that 2011 petition is now gone, and the school has gotten even worse since then.

Many of the kids have now "graduated" without having learned basic skills. Currently, more than half of kids at Weigand cannot read, write, or do math at grade level.

Ruthie:

Teacher pensions are in danger in many states. Educators deserve a secure retirement; however, lawmakers have for years promised benefits that the system cannot afford. According to some estimates, America's pensions are underfunded by nearly one trillion dollars. This reality has caused experts to debate who is at fault, and what can be done to create a solvent system.

Yesterday, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute held a panel discussing a new report, "The Big Squeeze: Retirement Costs and School District Budgets." Participants included Sandi Jacobs from the National Council on Teacher Quality, Josh B. McGee from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, Charles Zogby, Pennsylvania's budget secretary, and Leo Casey, from the Albert Shanker Institute.

The panelists discussed the teacher pension issue through the lens of three school districts: Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Philadelphia. One panelist simplified the situation in these three states, stating that the cost to repair these underfunded systems lie either on the state (tax payers), retired teachers, or new teachers. Something must be done to ensure that teachers are compensated fairly and currently retired teachers do not lose promised benefits.

When Milwaukee was faced with a crippling pension situation in 2011, under Governor Walker's Act 10 labor reforms, retiree costs were deescalated by requiring employees to pay in to their pension accounts, instead of being covered exclusively by the district. Similarly, the Cleveland Metropolitan School District was able to scale back retiree costs by increasing taxes on new employees, whose future pensions will be funded differently.

Danielle Arndt:

Ann Arbor Board of Education members earn $130 per month for attending meetings. Broken down per meeting, that's about $43. Other school board members in Washtenaw County earn $25 or $30 per meeting -- or nothing at all.

Desperate times call for desperate measures.
It's a statement that recently has played out in school districts across the state of Michigan, as the number of traditional public schools facing staggering deficits and elimination of key educational services for Fiscal Year 2014 grows.

In Ann Arbor, high school transportation; more than 80 employees, including about 50 teachers; middle school pools; and several athletics programs are on the chopping block for the 2013-14 academic year.

However, one item not on the table is school board members' per diem stipends.

Chiew-Siah Tei:

My childhood memory is crowded with people, with their different languages and accents: my family spoke Mandarin and Hokkien; my playmates Cantonese, Hakka, Teochew and Hainan; there were Malays among my neighbours; and every evening the Indians got themselves drunk at the toddy hut opposite our house, before stopping by my father's butcher stall for a piece of wild boar meat for dinner, if they had some cash left.

For a child, everything seemed to be natural, the languages and the way they were spoken. As I grew up, though, I noticed how these languages intertwined, and how new words, new phrases - shared by different languages - were created. '苦力' (kuli), labourer, originated in the Malay synonym 'kuli'; and vice versa, '巴刹' (basha), market, derived from the Malay word 'pasar'.

This form of integration, I realised years later, is no longer about language but culture. It is the need to be understood and to understand, the need for this understanding to be recognised and, most importantly, the natural drive of these cultures to complement each other that had created, not just the words and phrases, but a new form of culture, of life. This discovery had planted the seed of my interest in experimenting with language in future.

John Tamny:

Speaking in Providence, RI not too long ago, the post-speech conversation turned to college education. The word was that Brown University's tuition alone had risen above $50,000 per year.

The above number is staggering. For the most part college students tune out during their four years on campus; that, or they memorize what's needed to get As on the tests. Why then would any parent pay the sky-high tuition, and then barring parental help, what 18-year old would take on that kind of debt in order to be the recipient of lots of largely useless information?

Brown is course not alone in this regard. Whether at public or private schools, college tuition over the years has skyrocketed. One factor, though it's certainly not as big as analysts presume, is the federal government's growing role in the financing of education.

With the above entity increasingly the only market for college loans, and with that same entity rather generous with the money of others, colleges and universities have very little incentive to do anything but raise tuition. Since our federal government is price insensitive, tuition can keep rising.

Andrew Hacker & Claudia Dreifus, via a kind Erich Zellmer email:

IN April, some 1.2 million New York students took their first Common Core State Standards tests, which are supposed to assess their knowledge and thinking on topics such as "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" and a single matrix equation in a vector variable.

Students were charged with analyzing both fiction and nonfiction, not only through multiple-choice answers but also short essays. The mathematics portion of the test included complex equations and word problems not always included in students' classroom curriculums. Indeed, the first wave of exams was so overwhelming for these young New Yorkers that some parents refused to let their children take the test.

These students, in grades 3 through 8, are taking part in what may be the most far-reaching experiment in American educational history. By the 2014-15 academic year, public schools in 45 states and the District of Columbia will administer Common Core tests to students of all ages. (Alaska, Nebraska, Texas and Virginia have so far held out; Minnesota will use only the Common Core English test.) Many Catholic schools have also decided to implement the Common Core standards; most private, nonreligious schools have concluded that the program isn't for them.

Many of these "assessments," as they are called, will be more rigorous than any in the past. Whether the Common Core is called a curriculum or not, there's little doubt that teachers will feel pressured to gear much of their instruction to this annual regimen. In the coming years, test results are likely to affect decisions about grade promotion for students, teachers' job status and school viability.

Esther Cepeda:

When I saw a recent Pew Hispanic Center report with the sunny title, "Hispanic High School Graduates Pass Whites in Rate of College Enrollment," I thought, "What's the catch?"

There was none on this exact point. A record 69 percent of Hispanic high school graduates in the class of 2012 enrolled in college that fall. But this was the only bright spot in the Pew survey. The high school dropout rate is falling, but it is still far above the rate for whites. In 2011, 14 percent of Hispanics ages 16 to 24 were dropouts. This was half the level in 2000. White students, in comparison, had a 5 percent dropout rate in 2011.

And all those college-going Latinos don't have such great prospects for earning a degree. According to Pew, Hispanic students are much less likely than their white counterparts to enroll in a four-year college (56 percent versus 72 percent). They are less likely to attend a selective college, less likely to be enrolled in college full time, and less likely to complete a bachelor's degree.

Todd Milewski:

Where has the rise in poverty been the sharpest in Dane County schools over the last 10 years? Use our interactive graphic showing the changes in percentage of children approved for free or reduced-price meals by school or by district.

Vivian Yee:

It was once common for elementary-school teachers to arrange their classrooms by ability, placing the highest-achieving students in one cluster, the lowest in another. But ability grouping and its close cousin, tracking, in which children take different classes based on their proficiency levels, fell out of favor in the late 1980s and the 1990s as critics charged that they perpetuated inequality by trapping poor and minority students in low-level groups.

Now ability grouping has re-emerged in classrooms all over the country -- a trend that has surprised education experts who believed the outcry had all but ended its use.

A new analysis from the National Assessment of Educational Progressa a Census-like agency for school statistics, shows that of the fourth-grade teachers surveyed, 71 percent said they had grouped students by reading ability in 2009, up from 28 percent in 1998. In math, 61 percent of fourth-grade teachers reported ability grouping in 2011, up from 40 percent in 1996.

"These practices were essentially stigmatized," said Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who first noted the returning trend in a March report, and who has studied the grouping debate. "It's kind of gone underground, it's become less controversial."

Much more on ability grouping, here.

Alan Borsuk:

I usually give awards for special distinction for work on kindergarten through 12th-grade matters only at year's end. But we're having bonus presentations now to mark completion of the work of the Legislature's Joint Finance Committee on the state budget for the next two years.
The budget still has to go to the Assembly, Senate and Gov. Scott Walker, but Republican leaders are determined to kibosh any substantial changes, so it's a strong bet this is basically the final version. Without further ado, the awards:

The Surprise! Surprise! Award:
Intense competition for this, given all that happened after a 10-hour, closed-door session of Republicans led to an all-nighter for the committee. The prize goes to tax credits for private school tuition. Never put forth earlier as a proposal, never subject to public input, it was introduced and approved around dawn Wednesday. Starting in 2014, taxpayers could deduct as much as $10,000 from their income for state tax purposes to offset private school tuition. That translates into as much as $600-plus in actual money for some families and probably somewhat of a boost to the appeal of private schools.

Julia Lawrence:

As the dissatisfaction with the U.S. education system among parents grows, so does the appeal of homeschooling. Since 1999, the number of children who are being homeschooled has increased by 75%. Although currently only 4% of all school children nationwide are educated at home, the number of primary school kids whose parents choose to forgo traditional education is growing seven times faster than the number of kids enrolling in K-12 every year.

Any concerns expressed about the quality of education offered to the kids by their parents can surely be put to rest by the consistently high placement of homeschooled kids on standardized assessment exams. Data shows that those who are independently educated typically score between 65th and 89th percentile on such exams, while those attending traditional schools average on the 50th percentile. Furthermore, the achievement gaps, long plaguing school systems around the country, aren't present in homeschooling environment. There's no difference in achievement between sexes, income levels or race/ethnicity.

Recent studies laud homeschoolers' academic success, noting their significantly higher ACT-Composite scores as high schoolers and higher grade point averages as college students. Yet surprisingly, the average expenditure for the education of a homeschooled child, per year, is $500 to $600, compared to an average expenditure of $10,000 per child, per year, for public school students.

College recruiters from the best schools in the United States aren't slow to recognize homeschoolers' achievements. Those from non-traditional education environments matriculate in colleges and attain a four-year degree at much higher rates than their counterparts from public and even private schools. Homeschoolers are actively recruited by schools like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Stanford University and Duke.

Libby Nelson:

A proposal is circulating quietly on Capitol Hill to ask accreditors to create a new, more flexible form of approval for new and nontraditional providers of higher education.
The measure, a slight 37 words, contains few details about the new system it envisions. Its odds are long; so far, no lawmakers have volunteered to sponsor it. And its backers are few, albeit potentially influential: Bob Kerrey, the former New School president and Nebraska senator and governor, and Ben Nelson, the founder of the Minerva Project, the for-profit, startup online university with Ivy League-level ambitions. (Kerrey is executive chairman of the Minerva Institute for Research and Scholarship, a fledgling nonprofit established by the Minerva Project.)

Still, the proposal represents a shot across the bow at the traditional system of higher education accreditation, which has been under increasing pressure since the second half of the Bush administration. Margaret Spellings, the former education secretary, tried to take on the system through tighter scrutiny and new regulations, but met opposition in Congress.

Joshua Katz:

Starting with the point-referenced data from Bert Vaux's online survey of English dialects, we used a k-nearest neighbor smoothing algorithm to estimate the probability of seeing a particular answer--eg, whether a person would say soda, pop, or coke--at every point in the continental US.

The composite map gives a picture of the overall distribution, coloring each cell according to whichever answer is estimated to be most likely at that location. The more clearly one answer dominates, the darker the color. Individual maps show estimated probability of each particular answer at a given location, with larger probabilities shown in red and smaller probabilities shown in blue. At the moment, only the four most popular answers for each survey question are displayed.

Jon Bois:

"To a very great degree, school is a place where children learn to be stupid." - John Holt

My brother's first-grade classroom was a repurposed janitor's closet. There wasn't enough room for aisles, so he and his 40 classmates would crawl over the tops of the desks to enter and exit the room. They went on exactly one field trip that year, to one of the actual, honest-to-God classrooms the Cherokee County, Georgia, school system was frantically building to catch up to the massive influx of families moving to suburban Atlanta. "You'd better be on your best behavior," his teacher said, "or we'll never move into this classroom." They never did.

I reckon that my fourth-grade classroom, on the other end of the school, didn't suffer from as many health-code violations. There were a half-dozen leaks in the ceiling, but those would have probably helped if the classroom had ever caught on fire. We didn't really have aisles either; the desks were arranged in a sort of amorphous jumble to avoid the drips from above.

My parents were more concerned with the curriculum than what the classroom looked like. In third grade up North, I was learning long division, and then we moved to Georgia, where I stepped down to single-digit addition and subtraction. Worksheets featured such problems as 6-2, 3+9, even the occasional 1+1. One day, the kid next to me scooted his desk over. I thought he was going to laugh with me about the 1+1. He spoke in a thoroughly Southern drawl I was still getting used to. "You know how to do this? I don't get it," he said as he pointed at the first problem on his worksheet. Eight plus zero.

Kevin Drum:

You've probably seen this chart before, but it's worth seeing again: Student loan debt is just flatly out of control. I understand why this has happened, and I understand why it's hard to get a handle on, but we're going to regret it if we don't do something about this. We're training a whole generation to be wary of going to college, and for those who do, we're forcing them to start out their lives living under a mountain of debt. This is a recipe for disaster. More here from Maggie Severns.

It's also yet another fault line between young and old that's not likely to turn out well. My generation got a cheap college education when we were young, and we're getting good retirement benefits now that we're old. Pretty nice. But now we're turning around and telling today's twentysomethings that they should pay through the nose for college, keep paying taxes for our retirements, and oh by the way, when it comes time for you to retire your benefits are going to have to be cut. So sorry. And all this despite the fact that the country is richer than it was 50 years ago, and will be richer still 50 years from now.

But at least today's kids don't have to worry about being drafted. That's something, I suppose.

Die Zeit:

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.

Paul Fain:

Mitch Daniels is agnostic on the various delivery modes of higher education or the tax status of colleges offering them, as long as students are getting a quality education at an appropriate price.

"I'm only interested in results per dollar charged," Daniels, president of Purdue University and the former Indiana governor, said in a speech to for-profit-college leaders here on Thursday. "That's the value equation."

Daniels was speaking at the annual meeting of the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, which is the for-profit sector's primary trade group. The mood may have been glum here for some attendees, because most for-profits are coping with steep dips in enrollment and revenue.

However, the rest of higher education also faces challenges, Daniels said, many of which have similar dimensions to those that are buffeting for-profits. Tests for public universities include declining state support and questions from lawmakers and the general public about the value of college credentials.

"You must sense some of the same shifting of the ground that I do," said Daniels.
Furthermore, no college will be exempt from the growing clamor for accountability, he said. "It's coming and high time for it."

Sources:

• General and Categorical Aid - Payments to School Districts
• WISTAX Facts & Figures
• Madison Schools 2013-2014 June 10, 2013 Budget Discussion Document (PDF)
• Wisconsin State Tax Based K-12 Spending Growth Far Exceeds University Funding
• Up, Down & Transparency: Madison Schools Received $11.8M more in State Tax Dollars last year, Local District Forecasts a Possible Reduction of $8.7M this Year - March, 2013. The June 10, 2013 District budget document (PDF) fails to mention the previous year's large increase in redistributed State of Wisconsin tax dollars:

  Like all Wisconsin school districts, MMSD relies upon a state-local funding partnership. The actions of one partner greatly impact the other partner. The 2013-14 MMSD budget anticipates a major funding loss for MMSD (a loss of $8.7 in equalization aid) which shifts the funding burden onto the local property taxpayer.

First, the State of Wisconsin "committed" to 2/3 K-12 funding in the mid-1990's. The increase in redistributed state tax dollars is apparent. [Wisconsin Legislative Fiscal Bureau: State Aid to School Districts (PDF)]

Second, Madison's substantial real estate growth during the 2000's supported growing K-12 spending while reducing the property tax rate (the overall pie grew so the "rate" could fall somewhat). The real estate music stopped in the late 2000's ("Great Recession) and the tax rate began to grow again as the District consistently raised property taxes. *Note that there has been justifiable controversy over Madison's large number of tax exempt properties. Fewer exemptions expands the tax base and (potentially) reduces individual homeowner's taxes.

Third, Madison has long spent more per student than most public schools.

Fourth, the District's June 10, 2013 budget document fails to address two core aspects of its mission: total spending and program effectiveness. The most recent 2012-2013 District budget number (via a Matthew DeFour email) is $392,789,303. This is up 4.4% from the July, 2012 District budget number: $376,200,000. The District's budget has always - in my nine years of observation - increased throughout the school year. The late, lamented "citizen's budget" was a short lived effort to create a standard method to track changes over time.

Fifth, the June 10, 2013 document does not include the District's "Fund balance" or equity. The balance declined during the 2000's, somewhat controversially, but it has since grown. A current number would be useful, particularly in light of Madison's high property taxes.

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

Finally, years of spending and tax growth have not addressed the District's long term-disastrous reading results. Are we doing the same thing over and over?

The Economist:

URSULA VON DER LEYEN, Germany's labour minister, likes to point out that the two European Union countries with the lowest unemployment, especially among the young, have dual-education systems: Austria and Germany. Like Switzerland, they have a tradition of combining apprenticeships with formal schooling for the young "so that education is always tied to demand," she says. When youths graduate, they often have jobs to walk into.

With youth unemployment in Germany and Austria below 8% against 56% in Spain and 38% in Italy, Mrs von der Leyen has won Europe's attention. Germany recently signed memoranda with Greece, Italy, Latvia, Portugal, Slovakia and Spain to help set up vocational-education systems. Mrs von der Leyen discussed the topic in visits to Madrid in May and to Paris this week. There is even talk of a "new deal" for Europe, including bringing youths from crisis-hit countries to work in Germany and making more loans.

David Mercer:

Two math-notebook pages recently authenticated as belonging to Abraham Lincoln suggest the 16th president, who was known to downplay his formal education, may have spent more time in school than usually thought.
And the Illinois State University math professors behind the discovery say the work shows Lincoln was no slouch, either.

Math professors Nerida Ellerton and Ken Clements said Friday at the university in Normal that they'd recently confirmed that the two pages were part of a previously known math notebook from Lincoln's childhood. It was found in the archives of Houghton Library at Harvard University, where it remains.

The book, known as a cyphering book in Lincoln's day, is a sort math workbook in which Lincoln wrote math problems and their answers. It's the oldest known Lincoln manuscript.

Channel3000:

Madison College GED students graduated Thursday night before major changes are made to testing.

The class that graduated Thursday night is the last to graduate before GED requirements change January 2014. Starting in 2014 the tests will be computer-based and an essay portion will be added.

Students who don't finish before the deadline will have to start over.

"The students have made quite an accomplishment tonight," said Jim Merritt, director of testing and assessment at Madison College. "They have worked very hard and some of them have been working at it for years and have felt a little pressure to get done with the changes coming this year."

For most students, it takes years to complete the degree they hope will lead to better employment.

Annalee Newitz:

Every ten years, the average IQ goes up by about 3 points. Psychologist James Flynn has spent decades documenting this odd fact, which was eventually dubbed the Flynn Effect. The question is, does the Flynn Effect mean we're getting smarter? Not according to Flynn, who argues that the effect simply reveals that IQ measures teachable skills rather than innate ones. As education changed over time, kids got better at standardized tests like the IQ test. And so their scores went up.

But some thinkers cling to the idea that IQ measures an inborn intelligence that transcends culture and schooling. If that's true, one would expect that the most abstract, "culture free" elements of IQ testing wouldn't be subject to the Flynn Effect. But they are. And now two psychology researchers have shown why that is.

Jon Shelton:

Philadelphia is far from the only American city with major fiscal problems in the school system at the moment. Just a few weeks ago, a similar student walkout took place in Newark, and for much of this week, teachers and students have been protesting the Chicago Public School District's plan to close fifty-four public schools, mostly in Hispanic and African-American neighborhoods. These are not mere coincidences; indeed, both Newark and Chicago have demographic and economic trajectories that are similar to Philly. It is high time that we stop slashing budgets, closing schools, and blaming teachers and instead revisit the notion of metropolitan and even federal solutions to the crisis in urban education, which has been exacerbated by our seemingly endless economic downturn. We need to reconsider bold solutions to these problems--like integrating city and suburbs or legislating counter-cyclical revenue sharing that would pump up urban budgets during times of economic difficulty.

Because of the fractured nature of American metropolitan areas, those who live in the suburbs enjoy many of the privileges that cities offer--high-paying professional jobs, top-notch restaurants, museums, public transit, sports arenas--without contributing nearly as much to the city's tax base in return. Beyond that, all Americans have a vested interest in providing a great education for all young people: developing civic responsibility, an educated electorate, and the human capital necessary to compete in an integrated global economy should be in everyone's best interest. We may not live in a time in which these policies seem politically possible, but we must introduce them into the political conversation, instead of wallowing in the limits of what seems doable. If those thousands of marching students have shown us anything, it is that each of them wants an education. When historians look back at this period, perhaps they can point to 2013 as a time when talk about viable long-term solutions began, and every student was ensured the kind of education they deserve, no matter where they live.

The Roanoke Times:

Larry Sabato doesn't need to teach a free online course to become a celebrity professor. The director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics is one of the most visible and quoted academics in the country, analyzing topics as broad as presidential elections and as close to home as your local House of Delegates race.

But this fall, Sabato will enter the brave, new world of "massive open online courses," or MOOCs. Sabato will lead a free online course examining the administration of President John F. Kennedy and his legacy in the half-century since his assassination. The noncredit class will be offered through the educational technology company Coursera, a Silicon Valley startup that partners with some of the nation's top universities to offer free online courses.

Sabato said he was willing to conduct the course as part of UVa's experiment with MOOCs, one of the hottest trends in American higher education. Companies such as Coursera and Udacity and the nonprofit edX have partnered with scores of universities in the U.S. and abroad to offer online courses on their sites, potentially expanding the institutions' reach to millions of students worldwide.

Virginia Tech, which has developed its own strong distance-learning program, is not making an institutional push to experiment with MOOCs. Nor is it discouraging faculty from exploring opportunities. The Roanoke Times reported Monday that Tom Sanchez, a Tech urban affairs and planning professor, teamed with an Ohio State colleague to teach a course through Coursera for 21,000 students.

Drew Houston:

Thank you Chairman Reed, and congratulations to all of you in the class of 2013.

I'm so happy to be back at MIT, and it's an honor to be here with you today. I still wear my Brass Rat, and turning this ring around on graduation day is still one of the proudest moments of my life.

There are a lot of reasons why this is a special day, but the reason I'm so excited for all of you is that today is the first day of your life where you no longer need to check boxes.

For your first couple decades, success in life has meant jumping through one hoop after another: get these test scores, get into this college. Take these classes, get this degree. Get into this prestigious institution so you can get into the next prestigious institution. All of that ends today.

The hard thing about planning your life is you have no idea where you're going, but you want to get there as soon as possible. Maybe you'll start a company, or cure cancer, or write the great American novel. Or who knows? Maybe things will go horribly wrong. I had no idea.

Being up here in robes and speaking to all of you today wasn't exactly part of my plan seven years ago. In fact, I've never really had a grand plan -- and what I realize now is that it's probably impossible to have one after graduation, if ever.

Adam Alter:

The German poet Christian Morgenstern once said that "all seagulls look as though their name were Emma." Though Morgenstern was known for his nonsense poetry, there was truth in his suggestion that some linguistic labels are perfectly suited to the concepts they denote. "Dawdle" and "meander" sound as unhurried as the walking speeds they describe, and "awkward" and "gawky" sound as ungainly as the bodies they represent. When the Gestalt psychologist and fellow German Wolfgang Köhler read Morgenstern's poem, in the nineteen-twenties, he was moved to suggest that words convey symbolic ideas beyond their meaning. To test the idea more carefully, he asked a group of respondents to decide which of the two shapes below was a maluma and which was a takete:

Kris Olds:

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) were 'invented' in Canada in 2008, and then became transformed, institutionalized and scaled up via the efforts of people, universities, and firms, in the Boston and San Francisco Bay Area city-regions. In the process debates about MOOCs have blossomed, entangled as they are in discussions about online pedagogy through to longer-standing debates about lifelong learning, internationalization, austerity, 'disruptive innovation,' public service, deterritorialization, education reform, and many (many) other issues.

The European MOOCs in Global Context Workshop, a free and open access (i.e. no RSVP) event will be held in the Wisconsin Idea Room, Education Building, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 19-20 June 2013, This workshop is designed to engender discussion and debate about the MOOCs phenomenon from a European perspective, as well as about the implications of the MOOCs juggernaut for European universities and students. We seek to learn about MOOCs by contextualizing them, speaking about their histories and geographies, their technologies and aspirational futures, as well as their uneven geographies and power geometries. In doing so we hope that participants will become more astute thinkers about potentials and limits of MOOCs, not to mention how to situate the fast changing MOOCs phenomenon. Given this workshop attendees need not be Europeanists; you simply need to be interested in MOOCs, online learning, and the transformation of higher education more generally.