Obstacles seen for de blasio’s preschools plan

Mr. de Blasio has portrayed the proposal as a fast-acting antidote to inequality, and he has won endorsements from prominent experts in education and poverty. But his plan would most likely face several obstacles if he were elected.

As mayor, Mr. de Blasio would have to win approval from state leaders for the tax increase on those earning more than $500,000 — an arduous feat, at least at the outset, since lawmakers and the governor will face re-election in 2014.

On Wednesday, Mr. de Blasio’s aides said he would seek a slightly larger tax increase than he had originally indicated, after The New York Times questioned whether his earlier proposal would raise enough money for his goals.

Mr. de Blasio would also have to persuade large numbers of low-income families to sign up for extracurricular programs, something the city has struggled with for years. And he would have to remake the city’s patchwork of early childhood and tutoring services, which vary in quality and have limits on growth.

Taken together, the challenges facing Mr. de Blasio, currently the public advocate, may make it difficult to achieve a speedy transformation of the school system, political and educational experts said.

“To go from where you are to excellent will take 10 years,” said W. Steven Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research, who praised Mr. de Blasio’s proposal.

Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat, said that he was looking to make a lasting change to the city’s educational and economic ladder, and that he believed the idea had broad public support. “This is a prerequisite today to the kind of education that can succeed in the modern economy,” he said.

On the campaign trail, Mr. de Blasio has used the proposal to set himself apart from his opponents, who have mostly resisted the idea of raising taxes. He often describes New York as a “tale of two cities,” and he has said that prekindergarten and after-school programs are essential to help less-affluent residents thrive.

As Mr. de Blasio’s popularity in the polls has risen, his rivals have attacked the tax proposal, calling it irresponsible and unrealistic. At a debate last week, William C. Thompson Jr., a former city comptroller and a Democratic candidate for mayor, dismissed the plan as a “tax in search of an idea.”

Mr. de Blasio is calling for raising the city’s tax rate to 4.4 percent, from 3.87 percent, on income over $500,000, a difference of $530 for every $100,000 above that threshold. The increase is expected to raise about $530 million per year for the city, with $340 million to be spent on prekindergarten classes, and $190 million on after-school programs for middle school students. Until Wednesday, he had called for an increase to 4.3 percent, or $430 for every $100,000.

After The Times asked questions about whether the proposal would raise enough money, Mr. de Blasio’s staff amended it. The Independent Budget Office, which provided the original calculations, attributed the discrepancy to a miscommunication.

As mayor, Mr. de Blasio would have to gain approval in Albany, where the plan is likely to encounter stiff opposition from Republicans, who, joined by several breakaway Democrats, control the State Senate.

Conservative lawmakers and business leaders are already scoffing at the proposal.

“New York City already has some of the highest taxes in the nation,” said Scott Reif, a spokesman for Senate Republicans. “Raising taxes is not the answer.”

In the past, mayors including David N. Dinkins, Rudolph W. Giuliani and Michael R. Bloomberg have overcome resistance in Albany and won income tax increases. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, has generally opposed tax increases during his tenure, and he declined through a spokesman to comment on Mr. de Blasio’s plan.

William B. Eimicke, a Columbia University professor who has served in city and state government, said Mr. de Blasio would face long odds in the state capital, unless he were to win the mayoralty by a wide margin. “The chances aren’t really bright,” he said. “It will undermine his position, saying he speaks for the city, when a lot of people in the city will be lobbying in the other direction.”

Prime 5 education trends in 2013

So the world didn’t end, and now we’re all excited to pop open the champagne, eat way too much food, and ring in the New Year!
Despite the number 13’s unlucky reputation, we’re all super excited for 2013. Not only internally, where we here at Noodle are working hard to improve our product and give our users a top-of-the-line educational experience, but big changes are also happening externally in the education field.
So we’ve put together a list of the Top five trends in education that we’re most excited to see in 2013.
Happy New Year!
1. Social media will play an even bigger role

Social media has made its way into most sectors, from advertising to sports to the entertainment industry. So naturally, it was bound to become popular in the education field sooner or later. From student-created YouTube videos to SMS marketing to professors creating classroom focused blogs and Facebook pages, both teachers and students will continue to benefit from social media inside the classroom. Although social media has become increasingly popular in the past year or two, in 2013 we’re expecting it to make an even bigger splash in the classroom.
2. More universities will offer online learning

From free podcasts and online learning tutorials, the internet has made it possible for people to push their educational boundaries and access some of the best resources from the comfort of their own home. Now in addition to paid online classes and degree programs, some universities are even offering free non-credit online courses. Top schools like University of California – Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University are currently offering free courses, and we only expect to see this trend grow in the coming year. Noodle has also jumped on the online learning bandwagon, with a collection of over 450,000 free online learning materials, available to our users anytime, anywhere.
3. The MOOC trend will carry on

What’s a MOOC you might ask? No it's not a character from Dr. Seuss. It actually stands for “Massive Open Online Course” and has been all the rage in the ed tech sector since the term was coined in 2008. MOOCs are revolutionizing the way students learn, and this trend is making its impact across the globe. These courses are typically free, and only require a computer and, of course, the internet. For the new year, there is even talk that MOOCs will become a mechanism for students to receive official college credit. Currently the MOOC methods reach nearly 200 countries in 44 different languages, and have 4,500 testing centers around the world.
4. A better job market for college graduates

The recession might not be completely over, but upcoming college graduates can (hopefully) look forward to a less stressful job hunt than their predecessors. According to a survey conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), employers said they expect to hire 9.5% more graduates from the class of 2012 than they did from the previous graduating class. And students getting their degree in one of the STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), will be especially valuable to employers hiring in the new year. So to the class of 2013, take this as a sign to brush up on your interview skills, update your LinkedIn profile and score your dream job in 2013!
5. Game-based learning will gain popularity

Who doesn’t love a good game? Game-based learning (GBL) is becoming increasingly popular inside classroom walls, as teachers become more and more familiar with the process and its many benefits. GBL can be anything from learning simulations, to serious games, to using video games in the classroom. It’s understandable that parents might be skeptical (“Video games at school? Seriously?”) But GBL is designed to balance gameplay with subject matter, and help students retain and apply what they’ve learned in the real world. Although it’s still in the early phases, in 2013 we’re sure to see games being used more frequently in the learning process.

Programmes for students : accelerating mathematics

When a school has identified a group of students falling below National Standards expectations in mathematics, the ALiM (accelerated learning in mathematics) intervention project and its related MST (mathematics support teacher) project can be accessed.

When viewed as a whole, ALiM and MST take three years to complete. Schools undertake the inquiry into the acceleration of mathematics - either through opting into just one year and sustaining this process themselves, or going deeper by adding MST to help sustain their on-going improvement and inquiry processes.

ALiM and MST shouldn’t be thought of as a programme, because participating schools and teachers have a lot of flexibility to try different approaches in the actual design of their intervention. Rather, the two projects aim to give teachers the chance to share ideas, and utilise the guidance and advice of specialists.

Schools can discuss participating in the ALiM/MST project with their regional ministry office, based on data identifying the needs of their students. To benefit from ALiM/MST, schools need to have some effective mathematics teaching practice already in place. It should be noted that schools intending to participate in MST must have completed ALiM.

ALiM teachers work with one group of identified students over a 10 – 15 week period, whereas the MST teacher’s role is for a whole year. During this time, MST teachers work with multiple groups.

Additionally, the ALiM programme seeks to accelerate the learning of just one identified group of around six to eight students, who have been achieving ‘just below’ the National Standards.
An MST teacher works with several smaller groups of students, who have been identified as achieving ‘well below’ the National Standards.

Schools participating in the MST project nominate one teacher, or sometimes two for large schools, to step into the actual MST role. These teachers, over the next two years, complete post-graduate work outside the classroom, in the form of one university paper per year. This solid grounding in theory assists them in leading the design of a school’s mathematics intervention programme.

Obviously the MST must have a recognised degree to be eligible. Previously, MST teachers in their second year chose between two papers, but both papers over the two years are now compulsory. These are: (MST year 1) Making mathematics accessible and (MST year 2) Mathematics Education. Both are worth 30 credits.

While the MST is studying (outside school hours), they will also be implementing the skills they have learned. Funding that is allocated is intended to provide schools with the means to release MST teachers from some of their normal classes, so that they can work with the identified group of learners. This funding takes account of school size and decile. There is also an expectation that schools will contribute to funding. Within the initial ALiM programme, funding also means that schools can send principals and teachers to a series of workshops. More information on these workshops can be found in the first article of this series, Accelerated Learning in Literacy and Mathematics (Education Gazette, Volume 92, Issue 13).

Mentorship is available through PLD providers, for both ALiM and MST schools. The number of ‘contacts’ these mentorship specialists will have with a school varies, depending on whether they are ALiM or MST. A school’s remoteness can also be a factor. Schools are also supported at training days, visits to the school, Skype meetings, cluster meetings, and email conversations with specialists. 

 

During their study, MSTs conduct a thorough examination of several key themes, that are then incorporated into the design of their intervention programme. Examples of these themes include:

• Mathematics discourse: a lot of time is spent studying this during the first year of an MST’s learning. This is about creating a discussion around learning, and allowing students to elaborate on their own thinking.
• Revoicing: this idea is strongly associated with discourse. This means that students are able to restate their understanding of a concept, in their own words. Encouraging students to do this assists understanding.
• Rich tasks: a task or activity is ‘rich’ when it is approachable to students of different ability levels. It will also successfully encourage students to learn off each other.
• Wait time: this involves encouraging, and allowing for, all students to examine a problem and come up with a solution, regardless of ability level, or speed of comprehension.

Framing all these concepts and more, MSTs study the nature of best practice in a classroom environment, in which these themes are all able to work effectively.

ALiM in action at Red Beach School

Hellen Healey is associate principal and mathematics lead teacher at Red Beach primary school in the Rodney region. She reports that her school saw the ALiM project as an important opportunity to improve pedagogical understanding, and to arrest a noticeable trend.

“We looked at our data from the whole school over the last year, and we could see that this year’s current Year 5 had a lower level of achievement in maths, and that the group had shown the same tendency throughout their school life.”

The initial workshops were helpful, says Hellen, because they facilitated the sharing of strategies, and allowed her team to get advice from ALiM leaders. These specialists weren’t there to instruct, but rather to share initial ideas from which a programme could be pulled together according to their own knowledge of the unique issues faced by Red Beach.

Hellen and her colleague Sinead Heckett, who conducted all the intervention classes, found it initially very useful that they were able to be released from class to observe their target group. From this, they were able to see that two common obstacles were affecting many of the group.

“We had identified problem solving and the use of mathematics language as an issue at our school, within our target group. Sinead designed the programme to deal with those.”

“One of our responses to these challenges was to introduce real-life problems. We wanted to put exercises into a meaningful context, and we found that this helped make activities more fun and engaging. We really wanted to create a compelling reason for students to solve a problem.”

Sinead reiterates that the design of the intervention was very much left up to their school team, but that there was plenty of guidance available throughout the process.

“The initial two-day conference that we attended was all about talking about the parameters of the project. It wasn’t really about telling us what our programme should look like ‘on the ground’. Our cluster group met in our region, and we had lots of involvement from national leaders. That’s where we actually thrashed out the design of our programme, and had the opportunity to share ideas and strategy with other schools. That was incredibly useful and vital, in fact.”

Sinead was responsible for the actual design of the intervention at Red Beach, and says that it became apparent that engaging students had to be a priority in order to get them achieving National Standards.

“When I got to talk to these kids in detail, lots were saying that they found maths a bit boring. We needed to bring more ‘doing’ into lessons. So for example, we created an activity where the students made rainbow jellies. They found a recipe, and went out and bought the ingredients. They then had to use volume understanding to work out how many millilitres of each colour they would need. It was a highly motivating way to lead them through the concept.”

ALiM has achieved real results for Red Beach School, in bringing a group that was flying just below the radar up to speed. Sinead breaks down the numbers.

“Over the course of our 10-week programme, five out of the six targeted students shifted from ‘below’ [National Standard level] to ‘at standard’. We made this judgement in June, so they had achieved with half the year to go. The one student who didn’t quite get there still made a whole year’s worth of progress.”

“We used a variety of testing methods, at the halfway point and at the end. We were really interested in the results of the PAT tests, because they give a good overview of a student as a mathematician. They all made between six and 20 points of scale score shift, which equates to anything between eight months and two and half years progress in 10 weeks.

Both Sinead and Hellen say that the ALiM experience has been very positive at their school. But the most important thing has been spreading the message throughout the school. Sinead and her team have used some of the learning that happened within ALiM to inform a coaching programme, that is working well as an on-going measure.

Language as learning tool

The Pasifika teacher aide professional development project emerged from research commissioned by the Ministry in 2004, when it was realised that there wasn’t at that time an effective programme to up-skill and support teacher aides in using Pasifika languages for learning.

The Ministry-contracted project is directed and facilitated by Rae Si’ilata of the University of Auckland, who also founded the initiative, and has reached more than 250 schools, 250 coordinating teachers, and 660 teacher aides. Rae works with regional facilitators in delivering the programme nationwide. The criteria for selection are wide-ranging and include the number of enrolled Pasifika students, the recommendation of ESOL verifiers, and particularly those needing support in meeting the needs of Pasifika students.

Schools register one coordinating teacher and at least two teacher aides in order to participate; around 10 schools and 40 participants then form regional cluster groups for the purpose of facilitating the programme.

Foundations

Rae Si’ilata’s career in education began in Porirua as a teacher in 1981. As she moved forward in her professional life, she has focused ever more closely on educational success among Māori and Pasifika people.

She has since successfully embarked on an academic career, having worked as a researcher with the Literacy Professional Development Project Pasifika Research as an ESOL adviser, and currently as a lecturer in the TESSOL graduate diploma at University of Auckland.

During her nine years in Samoa, which fell between teaching and academia, Rae was approached by her community to help them in founding a primary school, which she says was a seminal experience and one that informed her entire career. This year is the school’s 20th anniversary.

“It was amazing. We were so well supported by people back in New Zealand, who sent resources over. We formed a really strong connection with the school and the community. However, I do wish that I knew then what I know now! Samoan parents at the time wanted an English-medium school. If I went back and did it again, I would make sure that we used a bilingual programme, so that we ensured we were teaching parts of the curriculum in Samoan, in order to produce bilingual and biliteracy outcomes.”

Leaving language at the gate

When the investigation began into how Pasifika teacher aides were using languages in class, it became apparent very quickly that educators of Pasifika heritage did not readily associate their own first language with learning itself, and tended to mainly use their language for social communication and discipline only. Obviously, palagi/European teacher aides had, through no fault of their own, little idea of how to integrate the languages of their Pasifika students.

When asked, many among this initial sample group of Pasifika TAs expressed frustration at the perception that they should be leaving their language at the gate when coming to school. Many felt that it was intuitively obvious that they would be more effective in class if they were encouraged to use their first language. Rae says that there was a glaring need for stronger systemic change, especially in light of modern research that supports the idea that continued development of students’ bilingualism and biliteracy has strong connections to academic success and identity formation.

“In the years since the research, attitudes have shifted considerably around the place of first languages in education. I think we’ve still got a way to go, but certainly, the biggest change in recent years has been the surge in enthusiasm and good will toward the idea of using first languages, not just as an acknowledgement of our multi-cultural society, but as a tool in education.”

Rae and her team have just finished working with a Canterbury regional cluster, and she says that there was some very strong uptake of the ideas among the group. Because of the different cultural mix around the country, sometimes the design and delivery of the workshops must be adapted, she adds.

“We modify the programme depending on who we’re working with. Currently, I’m in Blenheim teaching an intensive regional programme. I think we had one Pasifika person at the gathering, a Tongan teacher aide, who had recently arrived from Tonga, having been a teacher. She had also engaged in PhD study. In that context, it’s so valuable for the palagi/European people to see the huge linguistic resource that TAs like her can bring to the discussion.”

“They [palagi/European participants] were really committed to utilising their students’ languages. So we had lots of palagi/European teacher aides bringing all these bilingual and multilingual resources that they had created in school. How did they do that? Well, they tapped into their community independently, so for me, knowing that these aides and teachers are actually asking Pasifika people in their community ‘what do you think?’ and ‘how do I put this into a Pasifika context?’ is just wonderfully encouraging. They have shown that it’s do-able.”

Three-pronged approach

Rae’s team works within three delivery models that the Ministry applies to the PTAP. The first model comprises a series of four day-long workshops that take place over two terms. Rae co-facilitates these workshops with regional facilitators. These regional specialists conduct in-school visits, where they observe TA practice and provide feedback. Rae says that for many, this co-constructed conversation is the first time that a lot of them have been asked to talk about their use of language, and they respond well to the encouragement.

“That’s one of the really important factors, that the teacher aides get the opportunity for feedback. It really means a lot to them that someone values them enough to come in, observe their practice, and engage in a co-constructed learning conversation.”

The second delivery model is a follow-up workshop within the same cluster. This involves checking on the sustainability of new practices, and introducing new material for the schools to trial. The third piece of the puzzle is a more intensive approach, where the initial four workshops are condensed into a two-day programme. This option is used in areas outside the main centres which have growing Pasifika communities, e.g. Pukekohe, Gisborne, Blenheim and Oamaru.

Making a difference

Rochelle Atherton is a Year One and Two teacher of Samoan heritage who works at Christchurch’s Waltham Primary school. She served as co-ordinating teacher at her school and reports that the PTAP programme did wonders for her understanding of the issues around first languages. Rochelle also found the support of Helen Ah Siu, Regional Facilitator, to be invaluable.

“The programme was absolutely amazing. The big thing I took from the workshops was the emphasis on valuing Pacific cultures in the classroom. The first of the workshops in particular was really valuable in that it was quite specific in terms of strategies, but really easy to follow.”

Rochelle says that the workshops, and the strategies she took from them, shattered a number of her assumptions. Where she had previously thought that the bilingual ESOL children in her class understood that she, and the school, valued their culture, she came to understand that this maybe wasn’t the case.

“When I made the conscious decision to actually ask of the students things like ‘how do I say that in your language’ or ‘what do you do in your culture in this scenario’, I found that they would just shrug as a default response because they had never been asked. But after a while, the kids were bringing words and stories to school from home. It’s great that we can involve parents in this way, who I think had previously assumed that an English-medium school was just that and that alone.

“I think that there is no longer the impression, among the kids and parents, that school is not the place for their heritage.”

Speaking mandarin : ap program grows, goes global

High school students used to dread strenuous exams and difficult material. Now many teenagers are volunteering for college-level classes to get a head start on their higher education.
A record number of ambitious high school students attempted to qualify for college credit in 2012, with courses in Chinese Language & Culture and Computer Science receiving the highest crop of new students. Collegeboard.com's annual research report revealed that students took 574,567 tests in 2012, which is 50,000 more tests than were taken in 2011. That number has grown every year since the Advanced Placement (AP) program's inception, but last year marked the largest jump since 2009.
College Board's AP data offers a snapshot of students today and a projection of education in the future. Dive into the numbers and see what's next.

Foreign Flavor

Here's a long-running joke: What do you call a person who only speaks one language? Answer: an American. The U.S. is a melting pot, but its native citizens have been slow to adopt new languages. AP courses give students the chance to catch up with much of the rest of the world, offering exams in an array of languages, including Spanish, French, German, Japanese and the current trending dialect: Mandarin Chinese.
The number of students that took the Chinese language AP exam rose 17 percent in 2012, which is more than any other language, according to Collegeboard.com. This marks the fifth straight year that the Chinese language has boasted the highest growth. Call it globalization or the world shrinking, but high school students are savvy to the ever-growing connection between the U.S. and China.

Classic Classes

It wasn't just trendy subjects that contributed to the overall AP growth in 2012. Economics, Calculus, English and World History all grew by at least six percent. Test-taking in all of those subjects has risen each of the last 10 years, so it's clear that while some subjects are on a faster ascent, the AP program as a whole is on the rise. The number of schools offering AP exams rose by just two percent in 2012, while total tests rose by seven percent.

AP Log-In

Most students are fluent in all-things computer, but AP courses are giving students a formal foundation in the virtual world. Computer Science was the largest growing subject in 2012, with an 18 percent increase from 2011. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the computer software industry is projected to grow faster than average through 2020, so these tech-savvy high school students are setting themselves up for the future. In 2013, College Board is making a 21st-century shift itself, offering AP scores online for the first time.

College Fever

The University of Texas - Austin received 33,139 AP scores, more than any other college or university. Large public universities dominated the top 10 list of schools that received the most AP scores. As students gain college credit in high school, they lower the cost of college. Each AP exam costs $89, which is well below the price for a three-credit class at most colleges.
Whether it is to save money down the road or avoid lower-level classes, students are jumping at the chance to start college early. That enthusiasm is sure to carry them to better and brighter opportunities.

Kids will learn plenty more often schools are teaching

When you study education, one of the most depressing revelations is the extent to which the Education Establishment has abandoned its main responsibility. 
Our elite educators come up with one pretext after another for not doing much in the way of education. Finally, you have this vast landscape full of almost nothing, at least nothing academic, intellectual, or scholarly.
This is wildly counterintuitive. You don’t expect to look across the educational landscape and see an empty wasteland, although a famous professor did write a book in 1953 with that exact title, “Educational Wastelands--the Retreat from Learning in our Public Schools.”
How do they justify this retreat? Basically, they throw out one basic lie: “Our children can’t handle that.” Sometimes they say, “Our children don’t need that.” The constant theme is that children are limited, unable to learn anything difficult, and lacking in intellectual curiosity.
Our Education Establishment justifies having dumb schools by insisting that the children themselves are dumb.
Our top educators seem to think that kids are born ignorant, and we shouldn’t disturb the natural order of things. Obviously, this is a self-serving cop-out by people more interested in social engineering (read: leveling) than in educating anyone.
The problem now is that these silly sophistries have permeated every corner of the country. Adults look at children and think, they’re just kids, we can’t expect much.
We need to turn this thing around 180°. Start with the premise that children can learn far more than now, probably ten times more.
Let’s do a blue-sky exploration of what is possible. Pick any three serious subjects at random. Here are the three that first came to my mind: steam engines, the Olympics, nuclear physics.
Children could and should learn about these things. But it’s safe to predict that if you dared to suggest this to our top educators, they would faint from the impossibility of teaching such substantial information to a child. They haven’t tried in many decades, therefore it can’t be done.
I submit that it’s feasible (maybe easy given the power of Google) for any serious teacher to assemble 1000 facts, quotations, photographs, videos, Hollywood film clips, maps and other engaging material on each subject. During a typical class, the teacher would discuss the most interesting 30-40 of these items to the children. Explain and connect. In a month the teacher would cover the thousand pieces of information. At that point the children would be brainiacs on the subject.
 Does someone object you couldn’t find 1000 interesting bits about steam engines? Nonsense. You could find 1000 bits about a single steam engine now operating. What a fascinating subject. How do they work? When did they first show up? How are they used in trains, ships, cars, and even toys? You can teach history through the development and spread of the steam engine and the steam locomotive. (I think Google Images has something like 500 pictures just under the search term "train wrecks.")
The Olympics? There are no doubt 1000 hours of film available from the last 20 Olympics. Probably a million photographs. Probably a billion words. If you can’t make the Olympics interesting, quit. (Did you know, for example, that every four years the best design companies in the world compete to create entirely new graphics and signage for the next Olympics?)
Nuclear energy? You can show pictures of nuclear facilities around the planet, interiors and exteriors. Why are they so huge? What are the scientists doing there? We can show nuclear explosions, gas chamber experiments, famous people who worked on this. You skip the math and show everything else. Even for younger kids, you could talk about the atom, nuclear reactions, radiation, and what happened to that reactor in Japan.
My thesis is you can teach anything to anybody. You teach it at whatever level the class can handle, perhaps a little higher but never lower. Let’s think of the spectators at a football game, that is, average adults. It would be possible to engage and inform them on almost any subject. Whatever you can teach to them, you can teach to children. Who wouldn’t enjoy learning interesting things about nuclear energy, the Olympics, and steam engines? 
Everything I’ve said is obvious. The only reason it sounds ambitious is that the Education Establishment shut down all rational thought on the subject years ago. They start from the quackery that zero is normal: zero facts, zero teaching, zero learning. Zero is normal for them. 
It’s not normal for human beings at any point in their growth. What’s normal is that the brain focuses on interesting things and wants to learn more about them.

The 2013 education next survey

Although opposition to Common Core education standards is growing, an overwhelming majority of Americans remain supportive of these standards. A majority also back government funding of preschool education for disadvantaged children. At the same time, Americans are becoming increasingly resistant to demands for greater education spending and higher teacher pay. They give a higher evaluation to private schools than to public ones in their local community, but opposition to market-oriented school-reform proposals such as performance pay for teachers and school vouchers seems to be on the rise. Those are just a few of the findings from the seventh annual Education Next (EdNext) poll administered under the auspices of the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG) to a representative sample of the U.S. adult population. Teachers, parents, African Americans, and Hispanic respondents were also surveyed in large enough numbers to provide reliable estimates of their opinions. Detailed results from 2013 and from previous years are available on the EdNext website.
Please note that in this survey we place the neutral option on an issue—neither support for nor opposition to the policy—as the last response option rather than placing it in the middle position. As a result, the number of respondents who took the neutral position dropped on almost every issue from what had been observed in prior years. (See the Methodology sidebar below for survey specifics.)
Major Findings
Other than the reduction in the percentage of respondents taking a neutral position, we find little change in public opinion on most of the education policy questions about which we inquired in this survey. Responses to all items are available in the accompanying table. Our discussion focuses on questions not posed in prior years and on items for which we observe significant changes in public opinion from prior years.
High support for Common Core, but growing opposition
Support for the Common Core remains very high despite recent political controversy. Nearly two-thirds of Americans favor adopting these standards in their state, roughly the same share as last year (Fig. 1). Adoption of the Common Core is in fact one of the most popular reform proposals about which we inquired. Yet opposition to Common Core may be strengthening, as the policy has come under increasing criticism from groups at both ends of the political spectrum. Although the share of the public who express opposition remains small at just 13 percent, that percentage has nearly doubled since one year ago. The growth in opposition coincides with a decline among those taking a neutral position, which may be due to changes in the survey design discussed above. It’s notable, however, that the shift was almost entirely toward the opposition.

Higher evaluations of local private schools
The public holds the schools in its local community in higher regard than it holds the nation’s schools. Nearly half say that local public schools deserve a grade of either “A” or “B,” but only about one-fifth say the same for the nation’s public schools. But if the public thinks better of local public schools than it does of those in the nation as a whole, it is definitely more satisfied with local private schools than with public ones. Nearly three-fourths of Americans give private schools an “A” or “B” (Fig. 2). Just 5 percent give private schools a “D” or an “F,” as compared to 16 percent giving one of those low grades to local public schools and 23 percent giving those grades to the nation’s schools.

Schools better at serving the more-talented than the less-talented students
Much of the discussion concerning American education policy focuses on the achievement gap between high- and low-performing students. Americans agree with many critics who say the public schools do a better job of educating more capable students than educationally disadvantaged ones. Close to three-fourths of the public say their local schools are doing well at attending to the needs of more-talented students, but that percentage plummets to just 45 percent when asked about the effectiveness of local schools at meeting the needs of the less-talented (Fig. 3).
Teachers see less disparity in the treatment of high- and low-performing students. While 77 percent think the highly talented are well served, 66 percent of the teachers say the needs of the less-talented are also well attended to.

Support for pre-kindergarten spending
President Obama has called for federal funding of preschool programs, and the issue has received strong support in Congress despite concerns about government debt and partisan gridlock. Widespread support for pre-kindergarten funding proposals may be inspired by the popularity of the idea among the public at large. When asked about support for a proposal “that would allow low- and moderate-income four-year-old children to be given the opportunity to attend a preschool program, with the government paying the tuition,” no less than 60 percent of the public responded favorably, with just 27 percent voicing opposition. Among teachers the response was even more enthusiastic: 73 percent in favor and just 22 percent in opposition.
Declining support for school spending and teacher pay
We inquired about local school expenditures in two different ways. We asked half of our sample whether they would like to see funding for schools in their district increase, decrease, or remain the same, while we told the other half the current per-pupil spending in their district before we asked that question.
Among respondents not told actual spending levels, only 53 percent support higher funding, down 10 percentage points from the 63 percent who were supportive a year ago. Information about current spending decreases support for higher levels of spending. Among those told how much local schools currently spend, support for spending increases was 43 percent, the same as a year previously.
We are uncertain as to why the decline in support occurs only among those who were not told about actual expenditure levels. We do know that the public is no better at estimating actual expenditure levels than previously. It estimates that expenditures average $6,680 per pupil, hardly more than 50 percent of the average actual expenditure level of $12,637 per pupil in the districts where respondents live.
A similar pattern holds for attitudes toward teacher pay. In 2013, 55 percent of respondents not informed of current pay levels favor increases in teacher pay, down from 64 percent taking that position a year ago. Meanwhile, only 37 percent of those informed of salary levels favor an increase, virtually the same as the 36 percent taking that position in 2012. Once again, we cannot attribute the change to better knowledge of actual salary levels, as average estimates of salary levels remain essentially unchanged at $36,428, about $20,000 below actual average salaries in the states where respondents live.
Merit-based teacher tenure
Those supporting such performance pay policies remains at 49 percent, virtually unchanged from the last time we asked this question in 2011. However, resistance to the use of student performance information to evaluate teachers seems to have intensified. Opposition to basing teacher salaries in part on student progress has grown from 27 percent to 39 percent over the past two years.
Similarly, 27 percent oppose basing decisions about teacher tenure on how well students progress on standardized tests, nearly double the 14 percent opposed to the idea one year ago. To be sure, this is less than half of the share of the public who support tying tenure to student performance, which remains at 58 percent. The growth in opposition comes at the expense of those taking the neutral position. But that drop in those who have no definite opinion does not change the level of support for merit-based teacher policy. The entire shift is toward greater opposition.
School vouchers
Growing resistance to reform extends to school voucher programs as well. Opposition to expanding school choice through a universal voucher initiative that “gives all students an opportunity to go to private schools with government funding” is higher in this year’s survey than a year ago. Whereas 29 percent of Americans expressed opposition to universal vouchers in the 2012 survey, 37 percent do so in this year’s survey. Those in favor of a universal voucher plan make up 44 percent, hardly different from 43 percent one year previously, a shift well within the margin of error. The fact that most of the shifts away from the neutral position on the merit pay, merit tenure, and universal vouchers questions result in greater opposition—while levels of support remain unchanged—suggests that something more is happening than mere changes in survey design. At the very least, opposition appears to be stronger than previously reported.
Those without a definite opinion with respect to charter schools dropped to 24 percent in 2013 from 41 percent in 2012. That is one of the largest shifts away from neutrality that has taken place as a result of placement of the neutral position as the last of five options. Both supporters and opponents show gains. Support for charters shifts upward from 43 percent to 51 percent, while the level of opposition increases from 16 percent to 26 percent. Since both supporters and opponents gain roughly equal percentages, we interpret this result as indicating no underlying change in the balance of public opinion.
Conclusions
On most issues, public opinion does not change much over time, and so it has been this past year. Even though the past 12 months have been marked by teacher strikes, debt crises at all levels of government, and intense partisan debate, public opinion remains quite stable.
For that reason, it is all the more interesting to observe that in some cases a shift in public opinion seems to be occurring. The public is becoming more resistant to rising school expenditures and to raising teacher salaries. But the public is also becoming increasingly skeptical of such reform proposals as performance pay and school vouchers. Neither the defenders of the status quo nor those proposing major changes in education policy have achieved a public-opinion breakthrough in 2013.
Methodology
The results presented here are based upon a nationally representative, stratified sample of 1,138 adults (age 18 years and older) and representative oversamples of the following subgroups: public school teachers, parents of school-age children, African Americans, and Hispanics. Respondents could elect to complete the survey in English or Spanish.  The nationally representative sample discussed here represents a subset of a larger sample used to analyze a broader experiment about how individuals respond to information about school quality. The sample consists of those who responded to the question as presented in the table accompanying this essay.
Survey weights were employed to account for non-response and the oversampling of specific groups. In general, survey responses based on larger numbers of observations are more precise, that is, less prone to sampling variance, than those made across groups with fewer numbers of observations. As a consequence, answers attributed to the national population are more precisely estimated than are those attributed to groups. The margin of error for responses given by the full sample in the EdNext-PEPG survey is roughly 3 percentage points for questions on which opinion is evenly split. The specific number of respondents varies from question to question due to survey non-response and to the fact that, in the cases of school spending, teacher salary, and voucher questions, we randomly divided the sample into multiple groups in order to examine the effect of variations in the way questions were posed. In these cases, the online tables present separately the results for the different experimental conditions.
Percentages reported in the figures and online tables do not always add precisely to 100 as a result of rounding to the nearest percentage point.
William G. Howell served as director of the 2013 Education Next-PEPG Survey of Public Opinion. The survey was conducted in June 2013 by the polling firm Knowledge Networks (KN), a GtK company. KN maintains a nationally representative panel of adults, obtained via list-assisted random digit–dialing sampling techniques, who agree to participate in a limited number of online surveys. Detailed information about the maintenance of the KN panel, the protocols used to administer surveys, and the comparability of online and telephone surveys is available online at www.knowledgenetworks.com/quality/.
The presentation of response options for our support/oppose questions differs from the format used in previous years. Previously, respondents selected from five options appearing in the following order: “Completely favor,” “Somewhat favor,” “Neither favor nor oppose,” “Somewhat oppose,” and “Completely oppose.” In this survey, respondents selected from the same set of response options, but the “Neither favor nor oppose” choice appears at the end of the list rather than in the middle. Placing this choice at the center of the response options may imply that it represents a moderate or balanced position, which respondents may select for reasons of social desirability rather than because of true neutrality. Placement at the end of the response set may suggest that this is a residual category to be chosen only if the respondent is uncertain or indifferent. Of the items discussed in the essay, responses to those concerning the Common Core, preschool, merit tenure, merit pay, vouchers, and charter schools were affected by the change in survey design. The exact wording of each question is displayed in the survey results.

A likelihood at learning

This year, a study administered by researchers at Harvard and Stanford drew significant attention for what it revealed about how inadequately low-income students are represented at selective colleges and universities. Only 34 percent of the highest-achieving high-school seniors whose families fell in the bottom quarter of income distribution — versus 78 percent in the top quarter — attended one of the country’s most selective colleges, based on a list of nearly 250 schools compiled by Barron’s.

In New York City, where a neighborhood like Bushwick, in Brooklyn, can seem like a satellite campus of Wesleyan and a prewar apartment building on the Upper East Side can feel like an Ivy League dormitory for 46-year-olds, there has been considerable philanthropic attention, of the kind other cities ought to envy, paid to finding the most gifted low-income students and putting them on a similar path.

In 1978, Gary Simons, a Bronx teacher, founded Prep for Prep with the goal of identifying talented students of color in the city and readying them for attendance at private schools like Dalton and Groton and so on. Hundreds of the program’s alumni have gone on to law, medical and business schools, and employment at Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Time Warner.

A decade ago, hoping also to advance the best students attending public high schools, Mr. Simons and others founded another organization, Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America, or LEDA, which draws exceptional children from around the country, regardless of race, almost entirely from families who make less than $55,000 a year. Applicants are required to be in the top 10 percent of their class, having taken the most difficult courses their schools offer. The 60 who gain entry to the program each year spend the summer before 12th grade at Princeton, studying ethics, political theory and public policy, and preparing for standardized college entrance exams.

In a wondrous righting of the current disequilibrium, however small its scale, they are tutored for those tests by the same instructors who work with some of Manhattan’s wealthiest teenagers: the staff of Advantage Testing, whose services cost parents up to $795 an hour. Arun Alagappan, the founder and president of Advantage and a major benefactor of LEDA, provides his employees (whose résumés typically resemble those of the people at Google or McKinsey) pro bono.

LEDA has been very successful. Of the 500 or so students who have graduated from the program, three quarters have gone on to top-tier colleges, 30 percent of them to the Ivy League. Among LEDA’s 2012 graduates alone, 19 gained admission to Princeton, 11 to Georgetown and 6 to the University of Pennsylvania.

Last week I took a walk around Red Hook, Brooklyn, with Joshua El-Bey, a LEDA graduate who was leaving in a few days for his sophomore year at Yale. His family struggled as he grew up, moving often and ultimately landing in the Red Hook Houses, the borough’s largest public housing development. His first memories of book learning, he told me, were the readings his mother delivered from Genesis when he was 2. What was disconcerting about Mr. El-Bey’s otherwise incredibly inspiring trajectory was how much of his success had depended on opportunities outside the public education system.

Bullied in middle school for his studiousness, Mr. El-Bey hoped to gain admission to one of the city’s elite specialized public high schools, but he did not do well enough on the entrance exam. The free tutoring provided by the city for the test was insufficient, he said.

He ended up at Edward R. Murrow in Midwood, Brooklyn, a good school whose academics were nevertheless surpassed by the supplemental training he received as a scholar at Sponsors for Educational Opportunity, an organization begun 50 years ago by Manhattan lawyers and advertising executives as a mentoring program to get poor minority students into good colleges. Today it essentially provides a shadow education. In school, Mr. El-Bey told me, he simply learned to “regurgitate facts.”

Programs like LEDA and S.E.O. are popular with wealthy, supremely educated donors, precisely because of outcomes like Mr. El-Bey’s. Just this May, the financier Henry R. Kravis pledged $4 million in matching gifts to S.E.O.

And in a city as dense with talent and money as New York, the effects of such philanthropy can be effortlessly observed. Walking through his neighborhood, Mr. El-Bey ran into another alumnus of S.E.O., Luis Hernandez, who was about to begin his freshman year at the University of Southern California. In a precocious accomplishment more typical in other neighborhoods, Mr. Hernandez had won a screenwriting contest for a film about obesity that had already made its debut on the Showtime cable channel.

As a society we have begun to pay increasing and essential attention to gaining access to the top, but the brightest among us might do well to apply equal focus to how we might enhance the middle.

Most students, rich or poor, will not go to Harvard, while plenty of working-class and poor students will go to colleges that serve them not nearly well enough. Not long ago, our son’s caregiver, who is taking classes at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, showed me a paper she had written for a class in English composition taught by a teacher who was consistently late and twice absent. It was on Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” and my husband had helped her. It incisively analyzed the play’s theme of 19th-century marital oppression and was impeccably written.

When our nanny received her grade, she was shocked not to have done as well as she had expected. Her formatting had been imprecise, the teacher told her. And there was a problem with spacing. Content seemed not to matter much at all.

Fighting education overhaul, a large number of teachers disrupt mexico city

Mexico City — mexico’s highly anticipated education overhaul program — intended to weed out poorly performing teachers, establish professional hiring standards and weaken the powerful teachers’ union — is buckling beneath the tried-and-true tactic of huge street protests, throwing the center on your capital into chaos.

A radical teachers’ group mobilized thousands of members in Mexico City last week, chasing lawmakers from their chambers, occupying the city’s historic central square, blocking access to hotels and the international airport, and threatening to bring an already congested city to a halt in the coming days.

These mobilizations, analysts said, suggest how difficult it may be for President Enrique Peña Nieto to get through this and other changes he has pushed since taking office in December, including an energy and telecommunications overhaul deemed vital to revving up the economy.

Already, lawmakers, who passed the principal outlines of the education program in December and are negotiating additional legislation needed to carry it out, have shelved one of the bill’s most vital provisions, an evaluation requirement aimed at halting the common practice of buying and selling teaching jobs and establishing mechanisms to fire poorly performing instructors.

“What has happened is very grave,” said Sergio Aguayo, a political analyst at the Colegio de México. “A kidnapped city and a dismantled reform.”

Mr. Peña Nieto had focused on the public education system because he and analysts have called it vital to moving more people into the middle class.

Mexico ranks last in standardized test scores among the countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Teachers buy, sell or inherit positions as though they were family heirlooms. Removing poorly performing teachers is virtually impossible, even over allegations of sexual or substance abuse.

But this year began with hope that change was coming.

The main political parties agreed to work together to pass the overhaul. In February, the seemingly untouchable leader of the powerful main teachers’ union, Elba Esther Gordillo, was ousted from her post and jailed on suspicion of embezzlement, a rare rebuke to powerful figures here.

But by April, members of a small but militant faction of the union began pushing back with violent protests in Guerrero State, including the shutdown of the highway connecting the tourist hub of Acapulco to Mexico City. Demonstrators then paralyzed parts of Oaxaca and Michoacán States, in the south and west.

Last week, they descended on Mexico City, where they turned the central square into a tent city, forcing the Mexico City Marathon, scheduled for Sunday, to be rerouted. And they blockaded the two buildings belonging to the chambers of Congress, forcing the legislature to meet at a convention center. “The president of the country, the secretary of education, they are not putting up a fight for the reform,” said Edna Jaime, director of México Evalúa, a public policy research group. “They threw it out and left it alone.”

Ms. Jaime said she believed the federal and state governments were afraid of heightening the conflict with a direct confrontation.

On Friday, Mr. Peña Nieto defended the proposal, saying that teachers who objected to the changes misunderstood them.

“The education reform will give them opportunities that they don’t have today,” he said. “The reform benefits Mexico’s teachers because it is designed to give them job stability, clear rules and certainty for ascending within the national education system.”

Much of the rancor from the teachers has focused on evaluations. The new law would make them obligatory every four years. Teachers who failed an evaluation could try again a year later, and again a year after that. After failing three times, tenured teachers would be moved to administrative positions while newer teachers would be fired.

“This evaluation is disguised to start firing our peers,” said Floriberto Alejo, 50, a teacher who came from Oaxaca State on Monday.

Mr. Alejo said the proposed overhaul poses a risk to teachers’ seniority. “The education reform, full of tricks, is on track to privatize education.” He said the change intends to fire many teachers and make it harder for parents to find fully staffed public schools, therefore forcing them to send their children to private ones.

Last week, Congress stripped that requirement from the bill, saying it would be taken up at a later date.

“If this content of the law is eliminated in order to avoid conflict, the reform will be practically inconclusive and have no effect,” said Sergio Cárdenas, an education expert at CIDE, a Mexico City research university.

By Friday, the city ground to a near standstill. Getting around the city, in some places, took two to three times as long as usual.

The country’s main airline, Aeroméxico, waived all change fees for passengers who missed their flights, while television stations showed alternate routes to the airport and other neighborhoods.

“This is the expression of a country that is drowning in violence,” said Mr. Aguayo, the political analyst. “There is no ability to impose democratic rules.”

Building babys brain : the role of music

"Researchers believe that musical training actually creates new pathways in the brain."

Music has a powerful effect on our emotions. Parents know that a quiet, gentle lullaby can soothe a fussy baby. And a majestic chorus can make us swell with excitement. But music also can affect the way we think.
In recent years, we've learned a lot about how the brain develops. Babies are born with billions of brain cells. During the first years of life, those brain cells form connections with other brain cells. Over time, the connections we use regularly become stronger. Children who grow up listening to music develop strong music-related connections.
Some of these music pathways actually affect the way we think. Listening to classical music can improve our spatial reasoning, at least for a short time. And learning to play an instrument may have an even longer effect on certain thinking skills.

Does Music Make Us Smarter?

Not exactly. Music seems to prime our brains for certain kinds of thinking. After listening to classical music, adults can do certain spatial tasks more quickly, such as putting together a jigsaw puzzle.
Why does this happen? The classical music pathways in our brain are similar to the pathways we use for spatial reasoning. When we listen to classical music, the spatial pathways are "turned on" and ready to be used.
This priming makes it easier to work a puzzle quickly. But the effect lasts only a short time. Our improved spatial skills fade about an hour after we stop listening to the music.
Learning to play an instrument can have longer-lasting effects on spatial reasoning, however. In several studies, children who took piano lessons for six months improved their ability to work puzzles and solve other spatial tasks by as much as 30 percent.
Why does playing an instrument make such a difference? Researchers believe that musical training creates new pathways in the brain.

Why Classical Music?

The music most people call "classical"--works by composers such as Bach, Beethoven, or Mozart--is different from music such as rock and country. Classical music has a more complex musical structure. Babies as young as 3 months can pick out that structure and even recognize classical music selections they have heard before.
Researchers think the complexity of classical music is what primes the brain to solve spatial problems more quickly. So listening to classical music may have different effects on the brain than listening to other types of music.
This doesn't mean that other types of music aren't good. Listening to any kind of music helps build music-related pathways in the brain. And music can have positive effects on our moods that may make learning easier.

What Can You Do?

Parents and child-care providers can help nurture children's love of music beginning in infancy. Here are some ideas:

• Play music for your baby. Expose your baby to many different musical selections of various styles. If you play an instrument, practice when your baby is nearby. But keep the volume moderate. Loud music can damage a baby's hearing.
• Sing to your baby. It doesn't matter how well you sing! Hearing your voice helps your baby begin to learn language. Babies love the patterns and rhythms of songs. And even young babies can recognize specific melodies once they've heard them.
• Sing with your child. As children grow, they enjoy singing with you. And setting words to music actually helps the brain learn them more quickly and retain them longer. That's why we remember the lyrics of songs we sang as children, even if we haven't heard them in years.
• Start music lessons early. If you want your child to learn an instrument, you don't need to wait until elementary school to begin lessons. Young children's developing brains are equipped to learn music. Most four- and five-year-olds enjoy making music and can learn the basics of some instruments. And starting lessons early helps children build a lifelong love of music.
• Encourage your child's school to teach music. Singing helps stimulate the brain, at least briefly. Over time, music education as a part of school can help build skills such as coordination and creativity. And learning music helps your child become a well-rounded person.

Children’s advocacy cluster faults learning apps for babies

The walt disney company’s “baby einstein” videos don't flip babies into prodigies. and despite selling claims by fisher-price, its fashionable “laugh & learn” mobile apps could not teach babies language or counting skills, according to your criticism filed on wednesday when using the federal trade commission.

as mobile devices supplant tv as entertainment vehicles for younger kids, media and software corporations increasingly see opportunities within the whole baby learning app market. however the criticism onto the f. t. c. by your campaign obtain a commercial-free childhood, a similar nonprofit cluster that helped prompt “baby einstein” to backtrack from its educational claims, challenges the thought that such apps offer a little more than straightforward entertainment price.

additionally onto the criticism against fisher-price “laugh & learn” apps, that are downloaded a little more than 2. 8 million times, the advocacy cluster filed an analogous criticism on wednesday against apps for babies marketed by open solutions, a software developer.
a screen shot of fisher-prices laugh & learn let’s count animals for baby ipad app. a screen shot of fisher-price’s laugh & learn let’s count animals for baby ipad app.

according onto the complaints, the corporations say in selling material that their apps teach infants spatial skills, numbers, language or motor skills. however, the complaints claim, there's no rigorous scientific proof to prove that these varieties of product offer those benefits.

“the baby genius trade is notorious for selling product as educational, when in reality there's no proof the fact that they are, ” aforementioned susan linn, the director of one's campaign obtain a commercial-free childhood, which is certainly primarily based in boston. “parents deserve honest data in regards out to the educational price of one's activities they actually select for the kids and they actually are definitely not obtaining it from these corporations. ”

the group’s complaints too contend that using such apps “may be detrimental to terribly young kids. ” ms. linn aforementioned the programs might take a while far away from activities, like hands-on inventive play or face-time with caring adults, who have proved beneficial for infant learning. she noted that the american academy of pediatrics recommends that folks avoid screen media for kids below 2.

kathleen alfano, the senior director of kid research at fisher-price, which is certainly owned by mattel, aforementioned that the corporate conducts in depth research “to produce appropriate toys for your own ways kids play, discover as well as grow. ” she added that the corporate had “appropriately extended these well researched play patterns into your digital area. ”

stefan babinec, an govt at open solutions, which is certainly primarily based in bratislava, slovakia, aforementioned that his company’s selling material will not build claims like “get this game and allow it to teach your kid everything. ” rather, he aforementioned, the corporate thinks its apps “can facilitate folks with babies, either by entertaining babies or facilitate them see new things, animals, hear their sounds, etc. ”

his company agrees that digital screens are definitely not a replacement for live interactions with humans, he added, and assumes that kids use its apps beside a parent, sibling or baby sitter.

jay mayfield, a spokesman for your own f. t. c., confirmed that the agency had received the complaints however declined to comment on them.

the campaign obtain a commercial-free childhood pointed to seven iphone or ipad apps marketed by fisher-price, in conjunction with eight by open solutions, that are out there for download by the apple app or itunes stores. the colorful apps feature animated or high-definition illustrations of animal characters who invite younger kids to hear phrases or animal noises or purpose onto the animals’ ears, noses and different body elements. the apps are marketed as having educational price for terribly young kids.

the data page obtain a fisher-price ipad app referred to as “laugh & learn let’s count animals for baby, ” for example, says the app “teaches numbers and counting, 1-10, animals, initial words and action/reaction. ”

an data page for the app from open solutions referred to as “baby hear and scan verbs” makes additional elaborate claims : “here comes a brand new and innovative style of kids’ education. the application provides learning chance to learn how you can scan, pronounce and spell basic verbs. we've got tested this app and therefore the kids and folks merely love it !”

russ crupnick, senior vice president for trade analysis for the npd cluster, a market research firm, aforementioned that folks who had downloaded such apps usually felt that the technology had created learning additional entertaining and easier for the kids. “a great deal of folks assume these apps are extremely educational, ” he aforementioned, “especially for younger kids. ”

the complaints against the app corporations are merely the newest salvo by your campaign obtain a commercial-free childhood against the electronic learning market aimed at infants and toddlers. many years ago, the cluster filed an analogous criticism against “baby einstein, ” the hugely fashionable videos for infants ; just like a result, the walt disney company, that owns the baby einstein company, ultimately offered refunds to shoppers who had bought the product.

in 2011, the cluster filed a criticism against the marketers of another fashionable video product, “your baby will scan. ” ads for your own videos recommended the product might teach infants as young as 9 months previous to learn out to read. last year, the corporate, referred to as your baby will, agreed to settle charges of false advertising brought by your f. t. c.

currently app developers are selling a similar varieties of baby learning programs in mobile formats, ms. linn aforementioned, when using the potential to extend the level of time that infants pay in front of screens and affect their brain development. “this is one of the in our main considerations and why we take this trade on, ” ms. linn aforementioned.

Scrutinizing online math classes

Mathematics is a key player in everybody’s school days. It has the power to bring your down when you get failing grades in it despite the good results you received from your science, English, and history classes. It is the one subject that can pull you out of the honour’s list and dean’s list because of a few unsatisfactory marks. It is the class you desperately want to skip so as to spare yourself from another opportunity to embarrass yourself in front of everybody again.

However, math isn’t as horrible as that once you get the hang of it.

A good performance in math improves your self-esteem enough to do better in other subjects. It boosts your confidence in approaching difficult lessons, and numbers don’t faze you at all. Classmates look up to you and teachers admire you.

In order to jump from the first scenario to the second, you have to put a lot of effort into studying. Are you finding it difficult to focus at school because of the peer pressure? There are alternatives you can choose from, and one of them is online math learning.

Unlike your other options, it doesn’t cost as much as attending official review centres. Here’s an overview of how it is beneficial for everyone who wishes to develop their math skills.

Who are qualified for online mathematics courses?

Everyone is qualified to take these courses. Nonetheless, there are popular categories that people who pursue this fall into. First are elementary and high school students that are in need of assistance in certain math lessons and skills they didn’t quite grasp during school hours.

They turn to online alternatives because in the virtual world, they are the ones in full control. No one can bully them whenever they make mistakes and no time limit can lead them to think that they are too slow.
 
Homeschooling considers the internet as an important tool in teaching home-bound students and distant learners. It is cheaper than purchasing all those textbooks that will only be used once. The computer and the internet, on the other hand, have multiple functions that can really help students learn and stay interested.

Review centres are expensive and most students cannot afford them. Regardless of the level of education you are attempting to be eligible for and the rank of the school you are aiming to enter, online math courses are ready to cater for every branch of mathematics you need to study.

Preparing for Success

1. Make an Honest Assessment
What is the current level of your math skills? Be honest with yourself. This is important so you can make a proper evaluation of the steps you have to take in order to reach your goals. Refrain from starting at a level that is above your capabilities. Tricking yourself will only discourage your further and waste your time.

If you are having trouble identifying this on your own, then ask a friend you trust to make the assessment for you. Chances are, their observations will be closer to the truth.

2. Study in the Right Place
Mobile gadgets like laptops and iPads tempt students who utilize online math courses to study anywhere that seems convenient at the moment. This is not only a formula for continual distractions and futile efforts; it is the perfect method to throw you off track.

By all means, decide on two or three places you can guarantee will be free from distractions at the time you set for reviews. Computers and similar devices are stored with multiple applications. Given the right diversion, you will end up website-hopping rather than studying.

3. Be Comfortable
The worldwide web is a different kind of classroom from the ones you are used to. Here, the only participants are you and the math lessons, and if you want, an online tutor. There are no bullies and no clocks to constantly poke on the most sensitive areas of your brain.

Easing into this method of reviewing requires that you find the math website most suitable to your learning style. There are hundreds in the web waiting to be discovered. Be patient in your search. The variety of approaches to math that exists in this virtual world promises a match that is tailor made for your kind.

Finally, comfort doesn’t mean you can slack –off. Make the necessary effort to concentrate on the lessons you are reviewing. Keep a close reminder of your goals. The right equipments can do little to help you if you will not pour you energy into concentrating on this one task.

London school places crisis : quick solutions required

London's spectacular population growth is driven by its galloping birthrate, which means a lot more London kids, which means that London needs a lot more space to educate them in. A new report by London Councils, which represents the capital's 33 local authorities, anticipates "continued and disproportionate pressure" on school places for the foreseeable future, with a shortfall of 118,000 primary and secondary school places by 2016 - a tidy chunk of an anticipated school age London population of 1.25 million. A demographer recently told a London Assembly committee that by 2031 the capital will contain 300,000 more 4-15 year olds than it does today. Where will the little darlings be taught?
There have to be more schools, and plenty of them. The London Councils report argues that the boroughs have done all they can to expand the schools they run, noting that many of those they don't - the 229 academies, accounting for more than half of London's secondaries - are under no obligation to do the same.
It claims that the department for education allocates too small a slice of the national budget to the capital, and calculates that more than another billion is required in the coming years. Meanwhile, Boris Johnson says he's already had some success with persuading the government to hand over a bit more cash, and has set out to identify land and buildings that could become sites for new free schools, which he strongly supports.
It's no surprise that the mayor favours the government's free schools policy - contrary to the impression much of the media give, he agrees with David Cameron on practically everything except who should lead the Conservative Party - and yesterday his spokesman confirmed that he sees them as a big part of the school places solution, praising boroughs "across the political divide" who have supported setting them up, but also criticising some as "less helpful or even obstructive," sometimes for "ideological reasons."
There are already 26 free schools in Greater London, with a further 37 due to open in September. London Councils takes the view that as the government's academies programme - of which free schools are a part - expands, "delivery problems" have increased, with land availability and giving support for groups wanting to set up free schools at the top of the list. It recognises, however, that most of the new school places London needs will be provided by academies and free schools, and that the capital's local authorities need to respond quickly and constructively.
Free schools, of course, have their fierce critics, and some of their concerns are valid. But although my general report card on the mayor in his second term is that he should get extended detention, perhaps in a well known building on the opposite bank of the Thames from City Hall, I think many of his instincts on education are sound. He makes a good, practical case for London's mayor having a greater strategic role in the capital's education system, one that isn't out of step with how London Councils sees the borough's changing role of championing the aspirations of children and parents.
The problem London's education system confronts is partly a price of the quality of the capital's schools being so high - words some of we older London parents may still need to read twice. London's politicians must do all within their existing powers to ensure that the children of its baby boom continue to be served equally well.

Online education can function as the next bubble to pop, not ancient university learning

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.
Happily, and arguably thanks to the Bush/Obama economic disasters, there’s growing skepticism with government and its promiscuous benevolence with money not its own. With the electorate casting a more jaundiced eye toward federal spending, the argument is that student loans will be clipped ahead of the tuition ‘bubble’ popping. Fair point? Read on.
Beyond that, it’s hard to read a famous person’s memoir today, or to read about a famous person, without learning about how much of a non-factor education was in their success. For this writer the most recent read was the autobiography of Academy Award-winning director William Friedkin, The Friedkin Connection. In it, the much garlanded director noted that “My formal education ended in 1953, when I graduated from Senn High School on the North Side.” Friedkin learned to make films by doing. First at a local Chicago television station, then as a documentary filmmaker for David Wolper, and ultimately for big studios such that he can claim a Best Director Oscar statuette for The French Connection.
Friedkin’s not alone in this regard. Though he’s arguably the most successful filmmaker in the profession’s history, Steven Spielberg wasn’t accepted into USC’s film school; the latter widely thought of as the best. Academy Award-winning director Quentin Tarantino didn’t even graduate from high school. He did, however, get a job at now-defunct Video Archives where he learned by watching. As he once explained, “When people ask me if I went to film school, I tell them, ‘no, I went to films.’” Billionaire music and film impresario David Geffen entertainingly told his bosses at William Morris that he went to UCLA, except that he didn’t.
Moving to technology, Microsoft ’s Bill Gates famously dropped out of Harvard, as did Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg nearly thirty years later. Michael Dell dropped out of the University of Texas after started up his eponymous computer company in his dorm room, not to mention that the late Steve Jobs had no time for the educational experience at Reed College; a class on calligraphy that he audited after dropping out seemingly the exception.
The list is long of superior American achievers who didn’t have time for school, and it’s fair to say that their stories are yet another signal of a university-tuition bubble set to burst. If what’s learned in college is irrelevant to what’s done in the real world, aren’t sky-high college costs set to plummet?
No, they’re not. Though skyrocketing tuition and a growing anti-government tide are seemingly swimming against traditional university education, the true educational bubble forming is in the online space.
Yet to hear and read the pundits, online education is set to transform how we learn. Thanks to technology and the internet, kids anywhere in the world can be instructed by the world’s best professors. To buy all the giddy commentary is to believe that traditional college education will meet its maker thanks to crushing cost pressures from the online world. To put it plainly, why pay $50,000+ annually for undergraduate business instruction at Vanderbilt or SMU if for a fraction of the cost you can learn equities from Jeremy Siegel at Pennsylvania’s Wharton School? How about political science classes taught by Bill Clinton?
It all sounds so good and promising, until we realize that college is not about learning much as we might wish it were. Online education would erase traditional schooling if learning were truly the purpose of attending Princeton, or if employers cared what was learned at Princeton.
But when parents spend a fortune on their children’s schooling they’re not buying education; rather they’re buying the ‘right’ friends for them, the right contacts for the future, access to the right husbands and wives, not to mention buying their own (“Our son goes to Williams College”) status. The same is true for students taking out loans.
With university education jaw-droppingly expensive, it’s often asked what in terms of instruction kids are getting in return for the huge cost. Of course that’s a false question. Parents and kids once again aren’t buying education despite their protests to the contrary. Going to college is a status thing, not a learning thing. Kids go to college for the experience, not for what’s taught.

The ten commandments of graduate school

So you are starting graduate school, eh? Against all of our best advice here in the blogosphere, you are determined to embark on the scholarly life.  Well, you know what I have to say about that?
Good luck and godspeed! Keep your feet dry and your spectacles up to date! Cover your head when the sun is too bright! Don’t fly with ballpoint pens in your luggage! Get a cat!
As you make your way through this first year, finally acting on that sense of purpose that coalesced in your undergraduate years, know that there will be times of frustration and sorrow, but that many of us have found this to be a good life all the same. There are, as the foundations say, deliverables. There is the reading. There is the teaching (that sense that you have just taught a really good class? *Priceless*!!!) There is the blogging. There are the friends. There are the ideas. And there is the emerging world of digital humanities and social sciences initiatives just waiting for you to make a serious contribution to it.
Is academia in a godawful fix right now? Yes it is. So know that you need to prepare for that, and that you need to be part of the solution not part of the problem. Get involved in conversations at your university about what is a fair wage and a fair workload. Don’t act like long term contingent or contract faculty are failures. They aren’t. Don’t assume the tenure system is the best way to organize academic labor: it isn’t.
Most of all, the traditional job market is failing, and it will have to evolve. Evolve with it, and if you really want to be a college professor, you better not be picky about where you want to live. You need to be flexible, you need to be ready to change directions if your ideal job in your ideal city doesn’t have your name pasted on the front. Or your second place job. Or even your third choice job, in your fourth place city. How things ought to be is not how they are right now, and the sooner you face up to that, the better.
OK, so without further ado, these are the commandments that the Goddess handed to Tenured Radical on a brand-new iPad mini:

Thou shalt not rack up unnecessary credit card debt. You may need to take out student loans to pay for things like shelter, food, medical care and a decent laptop computer. But don’t take out loans to pay for things you bought just to make yourself feel better. Try to make a budget for yourself that includes fun and going out to dinner with friends, but not all kinds of stuff you will end up throwing away when you have to move. And just because it’s a book doesn’t mean you need to own it. One of the great weaknesses of academics is buying books they never get around to reading.

Thou shalt not neglect thy dental or health care. Every tooth of mine that gets worked on in middle age became a problem in graduate school. I am totally serious about  this.

Thou shalt find an excellent thrift store. You will gradually build yourself a wardrobe of professional clothes (ok, if you are like me, you will build a wardrobe of black tee shirts) and you needn’t buy anything new. Go to the swanky neighborhoods near your university and buy the really nice things other people discarded. If you don’t know how to shop, get someone to teach you.

Thou shalt not assume that merit systems are determinative. If there is anything I hate seeing on the Interwebz, it is people claiming that the person who got the job/fellowship/prize isn’t as smart or deserving or credentialed as they are. It’s the, “Gee I wrote four articles and have a book contract, and *that* person only wrote one article and a review essay” syndrome. I always wonder, Hmmm….maybe you didn’t get the job because the other person was nicer. #Everthinkathat? Academic success is not about racking up points and head to head competition. It’s about other people making choices that you have no control over. Do your best work, and then let it go.

Thou shalt have an excellent professional back-up plan. Tape this to your mirror. Keep your eyes peeled for opportunities to learn things that will give you options if that dream job — or any tenure stream job — does not materialize. Things digital, things foundation oriented, things administrative. Yes, the Ph.D. program is designed to educate you, but this is the moment to educate yourself.

Thou shalt become an excellent colleague. Be generous with the others in your cohort. Look for people’s good sides and try to ignore their annoying qualities. And if you must, be honest with someone, whether it’s a hygiene issue or something that is just getting on your nerves. Beginning any comment with, “Hey, it’s probably just me, but…..”

Thou shalt join thy professional organization. It is a false economy to be out of touch with what is going on in the larger world of your field (particularly if it’s not a terribly large world, like Scandinavian Studies or something.) While you are at it, keep educating yourself about academia in general by reading Inside Higher Ed, this publication (some of the best blogs are free, but a two year subscription is cheaper than a month of your cable bill), and academic blogs (particularly those in your field that will alert you to books long before the reviews appear in a journal.) There are many voices: listen to all of them, decide what you think and what you care about. Professionalize yourself. Even if you end up leaving academia, you will know why — and how to use your experience to do something that suits you better.

Thou shalt not suck up to thy mentors nor have sexual congress with them, nor shalt thou, when a TA, cross the line thyself. Need I elaborate? An excellent way to shred your career right at the beginning is to be part of a sexual harassment suit. Or a co-respondent in someone’s divorce. Here’s another hint: undergraduates and graduate TA’s are not “students” in the same way. Even if you are only a year or two older.

Thou shalt not gossip and spread hurtful calumny, nor write vituperative email, nor bcc when chastising others. Many of the ways you may have behaved on email as an undergraduate will erode your reputation as a graduate student. For example: telling tales out of school on the faculty or on other graduate students; expressing resentment and anger to an audience; or writing long, enraged emails that you copy to other people. Particularly in the latter case, that email may be out there forever. Don’t assume your university email is private either: make sure you have another account that only the NSA can get into.

Thou shalt use the word discourse sparingly; likewise neoliberalism, and other theoretical catchphrases designed to obscure that thou hast not fully thought through thine ideas. The best part of the first year in graduate school is immersing yourself in the theoretical tools of your discipline or interdisciplinary field. You will feel like a big, wonderful sponge.  But, as the wise Carroll Smith-Rosenberg once said to me, “Wear your theory lightly, my dear.” Don’t sound smart: be smart. Intellectuals don’t want to have Michel Foucault, or Michael Warner, or Gayatri Spivak, or Anthony Appiah read back to them: they want to know what you think. Make sure you know, and learn to speak and write it in the most inviting way you can.

Thou shalt remember that this was supposed to be fun. If you aren’t having fun, it is essential to find out why. Seek out appropriate counsel.
Most of all, if you think of yourself as an activist, or an intellectual who seeks a broader public, spend some of your time seeking out and acting on credentialing that might allow you to do that as an alternative to a traditional tenure track. More of us need to be out there, rather than in here. Be the change you want to see.