Jay Matthews:

In the first year of the YES College Preparatory School, community service was as important as reading, writing and mathematics. The public charter school’s name stands for Youth Engaged in Service, and its mostly low-income students moved through city neighborhoods like young social workers, practicing their academic skills by collecting information on bus routes, health clinics and many other real-world topics.

Joanne Jacobs:

Georgia’s Preschool System Gets High Marks, proclaims the LA Times. Georgia provides full-day preschool to all four-year-olds, regardless of financial need. The program, which started in 1995, is very popular. But the academic gains fade away in a few years.

Douglas Kern:

Not long ago, I showed up for my first year at Smartypants U., fresh from a high school career full of awards and honors and gold stars. My accomplishments all pointed towards a more verbal course of study, but I was determined to spend my college days learning something useful. With my strong science grades and excellent standardized test scores, I felt certain that I could handle whatever engineering challenges Smartypants U. had to offer. Remember: Kern = real good at math and science. You will have cause to forget that fact very soon.

via edspresso.

Tara Bahrampour:

Over the last five years, Wakefield, which has the highest percentage of immigrant and minority students of any high school in the county, has significantly increased participation in Advanced Placement tests.
More than half of Wakefield students qualify for federally subsidized lunches, and nearly 83 percent are members of a minority group. The school’s students come from more than 60 countries and speak more than 40 languages. Almost 17 percent speak a first language other than English.
“I think that this school is a particularly effective school, and it gets better every year,” said School Superintendent Robert G. Smith. Wakefield High plans to use the money from the award to expand college-preparatory programs.
In spring 2004, the school instituted a program called the Wakefield High School AP Network, designed to increase the diversity of the students taking honors and AP courses.

James Collier has more.

Liam Julian:

Last month, the Washington Post’s David Broder wrote a column trumpeting the value of teaching civics to American students. He interviewed Sandra Day O’Connor and former Colorado Governor Roy Romer (now serving as Superintendent of Los Angeles’s schools), both of whom are spokespersons for the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools (CMS).
A trip to CMS’s website reveals many applause-worthy sentiments—indeed, simply acknowledging the importance of civics education is commendable.
Yet both CMS and Broder’s fawning column make the same mistake that plagues many civic education initiatives. Instead of proposing that students learn civics through rigorous study of historical events, meaty biographies of important Americans, or lessons that integrate American history and politics with philosophy and character education, CMS offers a different model. One that puts the cart before the horse.
CMS offers “six promising approaches to civic learning” of which “Guided discussion of current local, national, and international issues and events” is one. What does this look like? The organization envisions teachers discussing “issues students find personally relevant … in a way that encourages multiple points of view.”
The problems with this proposal are legion. It says that issues discussed be limited to those that “students find personally relevant.” One wonders how relevant most 14-year-olds would find many international events, such as the recent country-wide protests in Nepal or Chinese President Hu Jintao’s U.S. visit. A major objective of civics instruction should be to educate students and make international events and issues relevant in their lives. It doesn’t work the other way around.

Joanne comments as well: “All opinion, no facts”. Jeff Jarvis on a new French-German history text.

Wisconsin State Journal editorial
Wednesday, May 3, 2006
Madison should take a bow and be proud of its decade-long effort to improve early reading skills and boost school achievement for all racial groups.
Yet the hard work isn’t over and may be getting harder.
UW-Madison education researchers hailed Madison this week for shrinking its racial achievement gap more than probably any urban area in the country. And at the same time, test scores for white students in Madison kept improving.
More young students of all backgrounds can read.
More older students of all backgrounds are graduating.
Madison’s formula for success, according to the researchers, is largely the result of three things:
One-to-one tutoring by trained volunteers.
The Wisconsin State Journal and WISC-TV (Ch. 3) helped launch a decade ago the Schools of Hope civil journalism project that stressed the recruitment and training of volunteer reading tutors. The United Way now oversees the effort and counts about 1,000 tutors working with 2,000 struggling students on reading and math in kindergarten through eighth grade.
Organizers say the effort will continue and possibly expand until at least 2011.
Small class sizes in the earliest grades.
The state is contributing millions to Madison schools for poor children to benefit from the extra attention smaller class sizes allow during kindergarten through third grade.
Better teacher training.
This might be the hardest element of Madison’s success to maintain, much less improve. With relatively flat school enrollment and high property values in Madison, the state steers a lower percentage of aid our way. And voters have shown they’re skeptical of approving higher operational spending than a state cap otherwise allows.
That means other areas of school spending should be cut before teacher training is reduced. Or perhaps the district can develop creative, lower-cost ways to train those teachers who most need it.
Madison just might become a national model for closing the racial achievement gap if existing trends continue. But that won’t be easy given financial constraints and a growing influx of students who lack English skills.
But hope is high. Volunteers are energetic. Educators passionately want students to succeed.
Let’s stay at it, Madison, and show the nation the way.

From the Wisconsin State Journal, May 2, 2006
ANDY HALL ahall@madison.com
Madison made more progress than any urban area in the country in shrinking the racial achievement gap and managed to raise the performance levels of all racial groups over the past decade, two UW- Madison education experts said Monday in urging local leaders to continue current strategies despite tight budgets.
“I’ve seen districts around the United States, and it really is remarkable that the Madison School District is raising the achievement levels for all students, and at the same time they’re closing the gaps,” Julie Underwood, dean of the UW- Madison School of Education, said in an interview.
Underwood said she’s heard of no other urban district that reduced the gap so significantly without letting the test scores of white students stagnate or slide closer to the levels of lower-achieving black, Hispanic or Southeast Asian students.
“The way that it’s happened in Madison,” she said, “is truly the best scenario. . . . We haven’t done it at the expense of white students.”
Among the most striking trends:
Disparities between the portions of white and minority students attaining the lowest ranking on the state Third Grade Reading Test have essentially been eliminated.
Increasing shares of students of all racial groups are scoring at the top levels – proficient and advanced – on the Third Grade Reading Test.
Graduation rates have improved significantly for students in every racial group.
Underwood commented after one of her colleagues, Adam Gamoran, director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, presented a review of efforts to attack the racial achievement gap to the Schools of Hope Leadership Team meeting at United Way of Dane County.
Gamoran told the 25- member team, comprised of community leaders from the school system, higher education, nonprofit agencies, business and government, that Madison’s strategy parallels national research documenting the most effective approaches – one-to-one tutoring, particularly from certified teachers; smaller class sizes; and improved training of teachers.
“My conclusion is that the strategies the Madison school system has put in place to reduce the racial achievement gap have paid off very well and my hope is that the strategies will continue,” said Gamoran, who as director of the education-research center oversees 60 research projects, most of which are federally funded. A sociologist who’s worked at UW-Madison since 1984, Gamoran’s research focuses on inequality in education and school reform.
In an interview, Gamoran said that Madison “bucked the national trend” by beginning to shrink the racial achievement during the late 1990s, while it was growing in most of America’s urban school districts.
But he warned that those gains are in jeopardy as Wisconsin school districts, including Madison, increasingly resort to cuts and referendums to balance their budgets.
Art Rainwater, Madison schools superintendent, said Gamoran’s analysis affirmed that the district and Schools of Hope, a civic journalism project of the Wisconsin State Journal and WISC-TV (Ch. 3) that grew into a community campaign to combat the racial achievement gap, are using the best known tactics – approaches that need to be preserved as the district makes future cuts.
“The things that we’ve done, which were the right things to do, positively affect not just our educationally neediest students,” Rainwater said. “They help everybody.”
John Matthews, executive director of Madison Teachers Inc., the teachers union, and Rainwater agree that the progress is fragile.
“The future of it is threatened if we don’t have it adequately funded,” Matthews said.
Leslie Ann Howard, United Way president, whose agency coordinates Schools of Hope, said Gamoran’s analysis will help focus the community’s efforts, which include about 1,000 trained volunteer tutors a year working with 2,000 struggling students on reading and math in grades kindergarten through eight.
The project’s leaders have vowed to continue working until at least 2011 to fight gaps that persist at other grade levels despite the gains among third- graders.
“I think it’s critical for the community to know that all kids benefited from the strategies that have been put in place the last 10 years – the highest achievers, the lowest achievers and everybody in between,” Howard said.
“To be able to say it’s helping everyone, I think is really astonishing.”

Barbara Kantrowitz and Pat Wingert:

A one-size-fits-all approach no longer works for everyone, the new thinking goes; a more individualized experience is better.
“We are changing the goal of high school and what it’s possible to achieve there,” says Tom Vander Ark, executive director of the Gates Foundation’s education initiative, which has spent $1 billion in 1,600 high schools in 40 states plus the District of Columbia over the last six years.
For parents and students, these schools mean an often bewildering array of choices — small schools within larger schools, specialized charter and magnet schools for things ranging from fashion design to computer programming, even public boarding schools for budding physicists or artists.

Newsweek’s Top 1138 US High Schools (16 Wisconsin high schools including one from Madison – Memorial ranked #924).

Continue reading Newsweek’s Challenge Index: Top 1138 US High Schools →

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