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This evening my colleague Bruce Thomadsen , professor of medical physics at UW-Madison, shared several concrete recommendations for improving the HR Design plan.  I think highly of his suggestions, and thus with permission I am summarizing the most critical ones here: Affirm the continuation of genuine shared governance ,  a pillar of UW, in this plan.  The language implies that employees will advise on the implementation of benefits programs, but this is far weaker than the current status of shared governance at our university.  Decision-making must be shard. Amend the plan to clearly state that academic staff have the right to due process with respect to all University actions detrimental to their jobs. This is not currently clear, especially with regard to layoffs. Provide much more detail on the implementation of the layoff procedures. In particular, explain how the new system will increase, rather than decrease, job security. The plan says that hiring managers ...

Tomorrow afternoon, the Faculty Senate at UW-Madison will hear from Bob Lavigna , the institution's Human Resources Director. Lavigna will be discussing HR Design , a new plan I've covered several times recently on this blog . It's a controversial proposal, in part because it shifts the focus on setting compensation from internal equity towards external markets .  It also reduces some of the benefits held by classified staff, who are currently unionized, and for whom perks like substantial vacation time slightly dull the pain stemming from the terrible wages. I was therefore intrigued when this morning I delved into my Inside Higher Ed backlog of reading and found the results of a brand new national survey of HR directors and their opinions about the future directions universities need to take.  The results help to at least partially set the broader stage on which HR Design is occurring.   (Partially: the response rate for this survey is 15% and with just 324 particip...

Catching up on my reading from the last few weeks and want to draw your attention to this bit of reporting from Inside Higher Ed . Key lessons here: (1) Pell spending leveled off in the last year. (2) A very sizable fraction of Pell dollars are still going to for-profit institutions, but this has declined a bit in the last year. (3) We could cut total Pell spending by $15 billion dollars (almost 45%) simply by deciding that public dollars cannot be spent at for-profit institutions.  This would make Pell policy consistent with the policies of most state grant programs. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is spending $3.3 million on efforts to " re-imagine aid design and delivery ." I'm hoping they will revisit the decades-old decision to offer aid through a voucher system that rests on the premise that maximizing choices in an open market will promote the well-being of all students and the national interest in an educated citizenry. But absent that, let's hope they p...

Like many universities throughout the country, UW-Madison is undergoing a restructuring of its human resources policies, aiming to make them more cost-effective by stimulating higher productivity-- bottom-line thinking encouraged and facilitated by the Wisconsin Legislature. Among the planned changes in the new  HR Design  plan, released last Friday, is a shift to use of " new compensation structures...with market data... gathered to inform compensation decisions .  Pay adjustments will reflect a broad range of factors (e.g., market, equity, performance) within defined parameters, and will be based on objective performance evaluations...These decisions will have to be made through fair, objective and transparent performance evaluations. Supervisors will be provided with training on how to conduct effective and bias-free performance evaluations and how to ensure that the supervisors who report to them are doing the same with their staff. Deans and ...

UW-Madison has a new fundraising campaign called " Share the Wonderful ," which I first learned about through the alumni magazine On Wisconsin .  In a time of fiscal austerity, all creative efforts to improve the university's resources are welcome and laudable.  Moreover, I understand that the relatively low rate of giving among Madison's alumni (10%) frustrates some people.  (Although, please note that last year Madison ranked 15th in the nation in total dollars from alumni--down from 2006 but not shabby.) But I think we should also consider how "Share the Wonderful" relates to UW System and UW-Madison's other goals and aims , such as improving the relationship with the legislature and the people of the state, and moving towards reinvigorated state financial support.  Nearly every action has an unintended consequence or two, and this one isn't likely an exception. Despite frequent and vehement proclamations to the contrary, the future of state sup...

We are now in my son's third week of public school, and as expected his experience is providing much fodder for discussion and laughter around our dinner table. For example, his favorite part of the day is lunch -- specifically hot lunch.  He started getting it during the middle of last week, after we finally figured out how to pay for it, and he's now enthralled. Yesterday he had pancakes and red peppers (yep, breakfast for lunch but they didn't forget the vegetables), and tomorrow there's bok choy on the menu. Next week, I noticed beets and jicama. Since I love to cook, and he chows edamame, he's going to fit right in. I'm delighted, since when I was in school I used to take the $1.50 my parents gave me and buy 2 packs of french fries and an ice cream sandwich to wash down with a lemonade. During the rest of the day, he's clearly learning things.  His handwriting has improved, he sings many new songs (including with words he says are "from Africa...

The following is a guest posting by Robin Rogers, associate professor of sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY). Robin's last post was the popular " Billionaire Education Policy ." She can be reached via email at robinrogers99@gmail.com Follow her on Twitter: @Robin_Rogers   Earlier this week I was a guest panelist for Al Jazeera English’s news program Inside Story . The half-hour feature – provocatively entitled “Should U.S. schools be run like businesses?” – focused on the Chicago teachers’ strike that had begun that morning. The two other guests were Joanne Barkan , who writes on economic, labor and education issues, and her clear foil Matthew Chingo s, a fellow at the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. – and, I should note, currently in a heated debate with Sara Goldrick-Rab . Barkan and Chingos are formidable thinkers and articulate advocates for their positions o...

It all started on Twitter, and then on this blog.... now this! BOULDER, CO (September 13, 2012) – A recent Brookings Institution report that looked at college enrollment rates of students attending voucher schools in New York City acknowledged no overall impacts of the vouchers on college attendance, but its authors trumpeted large, positive impacts for a subgroup of the voucher students: African Americans. A new review of the report, however, questions the claim of a strong positive impact even for that group. The Effects of School Vouchers on College Enrollment: Experimental Evidence from New York City was written by Matthew Chingos and Paul Peterson and published jointly by Brookings and by the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard. It was reviewed for the Think Twice think tank review project by professor Sara Goldrick-Rab of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The review is published by the National Education Policy Center, housed at the University of Colorado Bou...

Last Saturday night my family attended a benefit concert for Haiti Allies , a local program that has been worked in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere for over 20 years. One of the volunteers relayed a story that I cannot simply to stop turning over in my mind. On a recent visit, he cut the hair of a local man, and while doing so the man stopped him and say "Hey, are you rich?"  To which my fellow Madisonian replied, "I don't know. What's rich?" "Do you eat every day?" the man asked "Yes I do." "Well then," the man from Haiti replied, "you're rich. If you eat every day, you are   rich ."  As America struggles in political turmoil over how to regain its "economic footing" and we observe the 11th anniversary of September 11, a date on which some of the world's people expressed clear hatred of who we are, this is a conversation I think we must seriously consider.

In honor of our son's transition to kindergarten, I'm beginning a new series of observations of public schooling, which I hope my husband may join me in.  I'm partly doing this because I seek your input as to whether these are common occurrences, and whether you share my feelings about them, but also it will help me always remember these formative experiences with public schooling from the parent point of view. There is something a bit terrifying about putting your kid on the school bus.  For one, there are lots of moving bodies not wearing seat belts. That seems counter to the messages we give our children each time we carefully buckle them into the car.  Second, that's a lot of kids in one place unobserved by an adult who can pay attention-- the one adult is driving. I haven't seen any patrols on these buses- I used to be a patrol (!), are these now a thing of the past?  Third, it's not clear what happens on the other end.  Our little boy has to get off the bu...

UW-Madison students are happy students, as we recently learned from the Huffington Post . This high ranking of our institution is a coup when it comes to attracting more applications, and since we rise in rankings by rejecting more applicants (and rightly care about happiness), this will likely be seen as a good thing. Of course I'm delighted that our students are happy. Pleased as punch that they rate our sports culture and political activity highly (a 9 and an 8 out of 10 respectively), and the opportunities for things to do "endless."  It's wonderful-- they are spirited, free-thinking, and enthusiastic, and as all of my students well know, I love to teach them. But with love (yes, really) I need to offer a little constructive critique. We have some things to work on and they directly pertain to the educational mission (and indirectly the affordability mission) of our school.   In that same set of rankings we scored just a 6 on "professors accessible" and ...

Today our son entered public school. The first day of kindergarten was the theme of my Facebook news feed, as dozens of my fellow moms and dads sent their kids off on yellow buses, lunches packed, shoes carefully tied. I felt a part of that moment, but I was conscious of an additional layer to the experience in my home, where my husband and I spend so much time consciously agitating for the preservation of public education. Until today, Conor attended the Madison Waldorf School.  We enrolled him there partly because of a lack of a public preschool option, of course, but also because we felt that what he'd most benefit from was what Paul Tough calls in his wonderful new book How Children Succeed "character education" -- lessons in perseverance and generosity, grit and compassion. For three years we watched him flourish in this setting, where the 3 R's were ignored in favor of spirited play, outdoor romps, and fervent social interactions.  He developed into a wonderf...