Bullied boy’s parents say West Islip school responsible

Jennifer Maloney:

Patrick Kohlmann was scared. For more than a year at Udall Road Middle School in West Islip, the soft-spoken 13-year-old had been taunted and shoved, chased through the halls and slammed into lockers.
Then one day last month, Patrick says, one of his regular tormentors said, “I’m going to kill you tomorrow.”
The next morning, Patrick’s mother says, she warned the school’s vice principal about the threat. That afternoon, Patrick says, the bully struck him on the head with a rock.
He suffered a concussion.

“Magical Thinking on Education and Vouchers”

Diane Roberts:

This week’s summit — as sponsors call it — of Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education might seem like a mere “school choice” pep rally with a bonus excursion to the Magic Kingdom, but it’s happening at a time when the Legislature has decimated school funding. Moreover, this is an election year.
Headliners at the conference at the Disney World Contemporary Resort include New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, a slew of usual suspects from the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, plus Barbara Bush and state Sen. Dan Webster, whose valedictory piece of legislation was a resolution instructing Floridians to pray away hurricanes on June 1.
And, of course, Jeb Bush himself.
Three of the nine amendments Floridians will vote on this November will determine the course of public education in this state. Amendment 5 (Clusty / Google) gets rid of local property taxes designated for schools, requiring the Legislature to raise sales taxes or perform some other voodoo economics to make up the funding gap. Amendments 7 (Clusty / Google) and 9 (Clusty / Google) would demolish Florida’s separation of church and state and repeal the part of the Constitution that calls for a “uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools that allows students to obtain a high quality education.” The state would simply be obligated to provide education “fulfilled at a minimum and not exclusively” by public schools.
Out of office ain’t out of power — Amendments 7 and 9 come courtesy of Jeb Bush and his band of true believers.

Diane Roberts is professor of English at Florida State University.

Pacific Collegiate Charter School Climate

J.M. Brown:

For its advancement placement courses and high test stores, PCS was named California’s top charter school in 2006, followed by rankings in two national news magazines as a top U.S. charter school and public high school. But Goldenkranz’s departure is one of many big changes to hit the school of nearly 440 students in what has become a sweeping period of transition.
In April, a fractured board voted to support increasing enrollment over the next few years as a way to increase ethnic and socioeconomic diversity, as well as create more revenue for teacher salaries. Goldenkranz supported the growth, as did a majority of the school’s 31 faculty members.
In May, Santa Cruz City Schools announced the district and PCS had failed to reach accord on renewing the school’s lease. PCS officials said the district wanted the school to more than double its current annual $200,000 lease payments.
Ross said the nine-year-old school, which educates grades seven through 12, is preparing a Proposition 39 request of the district to provide facilities for the 71 percent of PCS students who live within its boundaries. PCS has waived its rights under Prop. 39 for the past five years in order to keep all of its students together, but now says it can’t afford the market rates the district wants to charge.
District supporters say the school could pull from its healthy reserves to pay more rent or buy a building. According to records at the county education office, PCS currently has a $1.2 million ending fund balance, equal to more than a third of its overall $3 million 2007-08 operating budget.
Watkins said he unsuccessfully encouraged the district to work out an arrangement to allow the school to stay put.

Pacific Collegiate Charter School website.

Madison Shabazz Grads Grads Celebrate Marching To Their Own Drummer

Jason Smathers:

Instead of flinging mortar boards into the air, students playfully batted around a beach ball. “Pomp and Circumstance” was replaced by an all-staff rendition of Crosby Stills Nash and Young’s “Teach Your Children.” One student even replaced the traditional cap and gown with a tie-dyed bandana, peace sign T-shirt and pearl white blazer.
It was just another normal graduation for Shabazz City High School (Map).
The school honored its graduates Thursday night in an informal ceremony where teachers described their students’ strengths and most memorable experiences. All 36 graduates were given time to speak their mind and thank the teachers and parents who helped them along the way.
“I learned so much more here than at any other school I’ve ever been to,” said departing senior John Baudhuin in a short speech echoed by many other students. “If I hadn’t gone here, there is no way this many doors would be open to me.”

Madison East Custodian Tells Graduates: “Judge Success From Your Heart”

Tamira Madsen:

James Ely has been blessed with two Madison East High School graduations 37 years apart.
Ely, a 1971 alumnus of East and the school’s custodian the past 15 years, was keynote speaker for the 2008 class that marked its commencement Friday night at the Kohl Center. The lifetime Madison resident’s second “graduation” coincided with his retirement from the school, located at 2222 E. Washington Ave.

(Map)

Studying Abroad – Two American Students Discuss Their Experiences

Open Education:

From 1991-92 through 2004-05, the number of students studying abroad has more than doubled according to Open Doors 2004. Representing an increase of roughly 145%, the raw numbers translate to about 71,000 students in 1991-92 to almost 175,000 in 2004-05.
Many in recent years have steered away from studying in Europe due to the falling dollar. Though most still list places like Rome, Paris, London, Barcelona and Amsterdam as their number one choices, sticker shock has many students turning towards other areas of the world.
However, at least two young ladies have followed their dreams of studying abroad in Europe. Emily and Rachel are both graduate students at the University of Amsterdam where they are in the ‘Brain and Cognitive Sciences’ master’s program run by the Cognitive Science Center, Amsterdam (CSCA).
Each has also made the most rare of commitments – neither is doing a simple semester or year abroad. Each has made the commitment to complete an entire degree program in a foreign land.

Louisiana Senate Approves Voucher Program

Bill Barrow:

Gov. Bobby Jindal moved one step closer Wednesday to final approval for a $10 million pilot program that would pay private school tuition for some children in Orleans Parish public schools.
The 25-12 Senate vote sends House Bill 1347 by Rep. Austin Badon, D-New Orleans, back to the lower chamber for its reconsideration. Some form of the measure, one of Jindal’s top legislative priorities, is now certain to reach the governor’s desk, with the plan slated to start this fall.
The vote represents another victory for social conservatives since Jindal took office in January. The grants also would pierce a philosophical veil, adding Louisiana to the list of states willing to direct public money to private K-12 schools.
Sen. Ann Duplessis, D-New Orleans, called that a great victory for 1,500 children who she said are more important than doctrinaire allegiance to public schools.

Madison’s Cherokee Middle School Wins the 100 Black Men of America Championship


A team from Madison’s Cherokee Middle School (100 Black men of Madison) defeated students from Charlotte, NC (100 Black Men – Charlotte) in this evening’s middle school African American History Challenge Bowl at the 100 Black Men of America Annual Conference in Orlando.
A team from Madison Memorial High School participated in the event’s initial round Thursday evening.
Photos and links from the March, 2008 Madison competition.
The above photo was taken at the March, 2008 Madison competition.

More on McCain’s K-12 Plans

Maria Glod:

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) hasn’t said much about how to fix America’s schools. But an adviser yesterday said the presumptive Republican presidential nominee supports using federal dollars for teacher merit pay and wants to change the No Child Left Behind law championed by President Bush.
Lisa Graham Keegan, former Arizona superintendent of public instruction and a McCain education policy adviser, said McCain wants annual testing to stay, and that schools would continue to be required to report those scores. But she said he wants educators to have more say in how to fix struggling schools.
“The federal government cannot position itself continually as the bully in this,” Keegan told a group of reporters today at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a nonprofit involved in education reform. “No more will we say that’s what 50 states are going to do, because he doesn’t believe that’s our best hope for improvement.”

To solve racial disparities, parents, schools call truce

Tim Nelson:

Minneapolis schools are hoping a new cooperative agreement with African-American parents will smooth some of the hard feelings over school closings last year and help close the district’s student achievement gap.
The idea is for black parents to help get their children ready to learn while the school district works with parents to help the kids succeed.
On average, black kids in Minneapolis schools do about half as well as their white classmates. They get disciplined more often. They get fewer diplomas.
That education gap has been the source of an increasingly bitter struggle in the city, but a group of parents and the school board have decided to call a truce.
The district voted Tuesday, to work with parents on what they’re calling a memorandum of agreement. It’s modeled on other agreements, like a pact with the NAACP and St. Paul Police and American Indian families and Minneapolis schools.

Schools can’t take gifted students for granted

Niki Paul
With the recent news about Salem-Keizer’s talented and gifted program under scrutiny again, I would like to commend the parents for their continual push and voice. Too often, important issues in education are dropped because the matters are not repeatedly brought to light.
Gifted students deserve appropriate learning opportunities and academic challenges so that they may become talented. We certainly reward competent athletes. It would be unthinkable to eliminate varsity or college football; we value the process of preparing professionals. Should we not then strive to add to our society highly talented artists, exceptional engineers, literary geniuses and the like?
School districts do not worry about their gifted students because from them, districts get better attendance, great test scores and graduates. School leaders view the parents as an annoyance and tune out their voices whenever possible. Yet the message has been sent and stands clear: Gifted and talented students are a special population needing special services.
What happens to bright, active learners when they aren’t challenged is they challenge the system. The underperforming gifted and talented become intellectually depressed in an academic environment that fails to challenge them. They are the “too smart for their own good” students who can pass every test without doing any of the time-filling work created to fill mandatory seat time.
When a gifted learner senses that learning opportunities are absent, he or she responds with challenging behavior. Wouldn’t it be wiser for teachers to be in the place of challenging learners rather than creating and managing challenging behaviors?
Again, district and schools respond to the needs of gifted and talented learners with blank stares, especially at the high school level. Students who attend, pass state tests and graduate do not arouse the attention of bureaucrats. Teachers cannot implement what is not programmatically available. They need tools, resources and time to challenge learners.

The Swedish Model
A Swedish firm has worked out how to make money running free schools

The Economist:

BIG-STATE, social-democratic Sweden seems an odd place to look for a free-market revolution. Yet that is what is under way in the country’s schools. Reforms that came into force in 1994 allow pretty much anyone who satisfies basic standards to open a new school and take in children at the state’s expense. The local municipality must pay the school what it would have spent educating each child itself—a sum of SKr48,000-70,000 ($8,000-12,000) a year, depending on the child’s age and the school’s location. Children must be admitted on a first-come, first-served basis—there must be no religious requirements or entrance exams. Nothing extra can be charged for, but making a profit is fine.
The reforms were controversial, especially within the Social Democratic Party, then in one of its rare spells in opposition. They would have been even more controversial had it been realised just how popular they would prove. In just 14 years the share of Swedish children educated privately has risen from a fraction of a percent to more than 10%.
At the time, it was assumed that most “free” schools would be foreign-language (English, Finnish or Estonian) or religious, or perhaps run by groups of parents in rural areas clubbing together to keep a local school alive. What no one predicted was the emergence of chains of schools. Yet that is where much of the growth in independent education has come from. Sweden’s Independent Schools Association has ten members that run more than six schools, and five that run ten or more.

Interesting.

College Track

Carolyne Zinko:

The educational nonprofit was founded in East Palo Alto in 1997 to help low-income students boost their grades, apply to college and obtain scholarships.
Students must apply to the after-school supplement to their high school studies and maintain a 3.0 grade point average. Those who falter are steered into a counseling group called Inspire, which tries, through group chat sessions, to motivate them to try harder.
There’s fun, too – summer field trips to Yosemite and Tahoe, because many students have never experienced the outdoors. And tucked into all this is counseling. College Track officials find there are times when they have to cajole parents into allowing their children to attend college out of the Bay Area or out of state. Parents who don’t speak English often look to their children as leaders, relying on them for help with translating and enlisting them in child care duties. They want their children close to home.

www.collegetrack.org

Who can make school boards stronger?

Laura Diamond:

A group of education and business leaders are trying to improve school boards across Georgia.
This new Commission for School Board Excellence was formed at the request of the State Board of Education. The group includes representatives from the Georgia and Metro Atlanta Chambers of Commerce and the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS).
The new group listed a few places where weak board struggle: micromanagement of staff, poor decision-making and mismanaging money.
These are severe problems. This new group may have good ideas on how to help school boards, but do you think board members will listen to the advice?

Related: How to Reform Your Local School Board by Steve Loehrke.

When Mom & Dad Share it All

Lisa Belkin:

On her first day back to work after a four-month maternity leave, Amy Vachon woke at dawn to nurse her daughter, Maia. Then she fixed herself a healthful breakfast, pumped a bottle of breast milk for the baby to drink later in the day, kissed the little girl goodbye and headed for the door.
But before she left, there was one more thing. She reached over to her husband, Marc, who would not be going to work that day in order to be home with Maia, and handed him the List. That’s what they call it now, when they revisit this moment, which they do fairly often. The List. It was nothing extraordinary — in fact it would be familiar to many new moms. A large yellow Post-it on which she had scribbled the “how much,” “how long” and “when” of Maia’s napping and eating.
“I knew her routines and was sharing that with Marc,” Amy recalls.
She also remembers what he did next. Gently but deliberately, he ripped the paper square in half and crumbled the pieces into a ball.
“I got the message,” Amy says.
That message was one the Vachons had agreed on from the evening they met, though they were clearly still tinkering with the details. They would not be the kind of parents their parents had been — the mother-knows-best mold. Nor the kind their friends were — the “involved” dad married to the stressed-out working mom. Nor even, as Marc put it, “the stay-at-home dad, who is cooed at for his sensitivity but who is as isolated and financially vulnerable as the stay-at-home-mom.”

Study of Small High Schools (Small Learning Communities or SLC) Yields Little on Achievement

David Hoff:

High schools receiving $80 million in annual federal funding to support “smaller learning communities” can document that they are taking steps to establish learning environments more intimate than found in the typical comprehensive high school.
But, according to a federal study, such smaller schools can’t answer the most significant question: Is student achievement improving in the smaller settings?
The evaluation of the 8-year-old program found that schools participating in it show signs of success. In the schools, the proportion of students being promoted from 9th to 10th grade increases, participation in extracurricular activities rises, and the rate of violent incidents declines.
But the evaluation found “no significant trends” in achievement on state tests or college-entrance exams, says the report, which was prepared by a private contractor and released by the U.S. Department of Education last week.

Related:

A Shake-Up in San Diego’s School Administrator Ranks

Emily Alpert:

Less than three months into his tenure, Superintendent Terry Grier is shaking up the top ranks of San Diego Unified.
Top-earning administrators and vice principals are interviewing to keep their own jobs. School district outsiders and insiders alike are being tapped to fill new slots. And Grier has introduced a novel method to screen the best principals and administrators for the jobs — an interview meant to measure values and problem-solving, aimed at picking the optimal principals and teachers for disadvantaged kids.
“It’s easy for us to get comfortable in our positions, comfortable in our expectations, and comfortable in our authority,” said Katherine Nakamura, the president of the school board. “It’s not a bad thing to reassess ourselves from time to time.”
Yet even as Grier announces his first selections, few staffers fully understand the big picture for San Diego Unified. Most employees still haven’t seen a simple chart outlining the new makeup of the school district: which jobs stay, which jobs go, and who reports to whom. The chart, which exists in draft form, has not yet been made public.
That uncertainty unnerves some employees. The rapid overhaul undertaken by Grier stands in contrast to his predecessor, Carl Cohn, who waited more than six months before introducing a new layout for San Diego Unified. The hallmark of Cohn’s reorganization, five area superintendents who divvied up the massive school district, weren’t appointed until eight months into his tenure.
“In 40 years, I have never heard anybody come in and immediately implement a procedure that says if you don’t pass this interview, you lose the job you’re in,” said Jeannie Steeg, executive director of the Administrators Association of San Diego. “And never has a process been implemented so quickly.
All vice principals underwent a new interview to compete for a shifting pool of jobs. The interview is modeled on the teachings of University of Wisconsin Milwaukee professor Martin Haberman, who studies disadvantaged students and the educators who help them best. Principals applying for new jobs were interviewed as well. San Diego Unified signed a $23,000 contract with the Haberman Educational Foundation to train staffers in the interview process, which includes problem-solving scenarios and is meant to reveal the applicants’ core values. Two people ask open-ended questions during a tape-recorded interview and score the answers.

SIS Martin Haberman links.

Education Secretary’s US Roadshow for No Child Left Behind

Sheryl Gay Stolberg:

Margaret Spellings is not running for office — at least, not yet. But in the waning days of the Bush presidency, she is running one last campaign.
On a cold and soggy morning in March, Ms. Spellings, the relentlessly cheery and sometimes sassy United States secretary of education, turned up here, at a little brick elementary school across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. She had been on the road for months, promoting President Bush’s beleaguered education initiative, No Child Left Behind, delivering one sales pitch after another.
“I’m pretty sure that the new president, whoever it is, will not show up and work on George Bush’s domestic achievement on Day 1,” she told a group of civic leaders and educators, promising to do “everything in my power” to improve the law before the White House changes hands.
For Ms. Spellings, a longtime and exceedingly loyal member of the Bush inner circle, it was a startling, if tacit, admission that the president’s education legacy is in danger. No Child Left Behind — the signature domestic achievement, beyond tax cuts, of the entire Bush presidency — has changed the lives of millions of American students, parents, teachers and school administrators. Yet its future is in grave doubt.

Out of Sight

Bob Herbert:

“Schools have not made much of an effort to bring this population back in,” said Mr. Jones. “Once you fall out of the system, you’re basically on no one’s programmatic radar screen.”
So these kids drift. Some are drawn to gangs. A disproportionate number become involved in crime. It is a tragic story, and very few people are paying attention.
The economic policies of the past few decades have favored the wealthy and the well-connected to a degree that has been breathtaking to behold. The Nation magazine has devoted its current issue to the Gilded Age-type inequality that has been the result.
Just a little bit of help to the millions of youngsters trying to get their first tentative foothold in that economy should not be too much to ask.

Schools Give Teachers a New Kind of Apple

Erin Richards:

It was after lunch in a social studies classroom at North Shore Middle School in Hartland when seventh-graders began tapping out messages to students in Germany, France, Kosovo and Bosnia on a fleet of shiny Apple laptops.
The modernized electronic version of paper-and-stamp correspondence the children were using, called ePals, is one of several programs being piloted in suburban districts this year as teachers and curriculum coordinators seek ways to extend learning beyond the physical limitations of the classroom.
The next big step, say officials in suburban districts, as well as in Milwaukee Public Schools, is exploring a 1-to-1 student laptop initiative or the possibility of issuing every student a hand-held computer, such as an iPod touch.
“There’s a far greater use of technology (in schools) when you make it mobile,” MPS Director of Technology Jim Davis said.

Education fundamental building block

Martin Shields:

Because economists tend to point out things like this, it is not surprising that I was not invited to give a commencement address. But if I had been, my message would have been a simple one.
Don’t worry. You made the right decision.
Recent earnings data indicates the essentiality of education. According to the Current Population Survey (CPS) annual earnings for Colorado’s full-time workers without a high school diploma averaged $25,916 in 2006. For Centennial State residents holding a high school degree only, annual earnings averaged $34,698. Over just 15 years, a (crude) calculation shows the high school diploma is worth about $132,000.
High school graduates are also less likely to live in poverty. CPS data from 2005 indicate 22.1 percent of Colorado’s adult population without a high school diploma lived in poverty. By comparison, the state’s high school only graduates had poverty rates of 11.6 percent.

Columbia, Missouri ACT Results Compared with Math Curriculum

Columbia Parents for Real Math:

CPS Secondary Math Curriculum Coordinator Chip Sharp provided average ACT scores reported by course enrollment which are used in the figures below. Plotting the data in several ways gives food for thought regarding the differences between algebra and integrated math pathways offered at CPS.
The data don’t distinguish between which students are sophomores, juniors or seniors when they take the ACT, which students may have repeated courses or what year they started the pathway (7th, 8th or 9th grade). But it does give some idea of how much math “preparation” each course pathway provides at least for the years for which data is available.

I’ve heard that Madison’s Math Task Force will render a report prior to Superintendent Art Rainwater’s June 30, 2008 retirement. Related: Math Forum.

Racine Restarts Superintendent Search

Dustin Block:

Final, final update: The J-S reports the telling detail about Pulliam’s decision. The Georgia district is paying her $155,000. Racine Unified started negotiations at $120,000. Could that be why the district is having a hard time attracting candidates?
Final Update: The Greene County Board of Education voted unanimously tonight in Greenesboro, GA, to hire Barbara Pulliam as its superintendent, thus snatching her from the Racine Unified School District, whose board made a similar vote in April. She will be joining a district in turmoil, one that fired its superintendent last Wednesday, one year into a three-year contract, in a dispute over a plan to implement gender-separate classes.
She starts work there Monday.
According to a story on OnlineAthens, she interviewed with the board the same night it decided to fire Shawn McCollough last week.

Education: Failing schools? Failing government, more like
Many children can’t read or write when they reach secondary school

Alice Miles:

pare a thought this morning for teachers whose schools have the lowest results in the country, waking up to a warning from the Government that they have 50 days – 50 days! – to produce an “action plan” or face closure or merger.
Some of these schools may deserve the opprobrium that ministers are inviting us to heap upon them. Many more will not. Most “failing” schools take the toughest kids from the most socially disadvantaged areas. They are not dealing with the problems you and I might be worrying about: whether the curriculum is broad enough for Sophie’s myriad interests, or when Jamie will fit in the third language you want him to learn.
These schools are dealing with children with deprived and disruptive family backgrounds many of whom cannot read or write English, lack any positive parental support and have already given up on their chances in life before they walk through the school gates at 11.

San Francisco Prosecutes Adults for Student Truancy

Nanette Asimov:

San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris issued citations Tuesday against six parents whose young children missed at least 50 days of school this year, the first time the city has prosecuted adults for student truancy.
Harris cited the parents of four children, ages 6 to 13, on charges that they kept the children home despite repeated efforts by the school district and law enforcement to address the problem.
“The charges are that they have violated California’s Education Code and allowed their children to go without an education,” Harris said at a news conference with the city’s school chief, Carlos Garcia.
She called chronic truancy a matter of public safety and said the vast majority of prison inmates and homicide victims are dropouts or habitual truants.

Do new teachers mean a new era in education?

Walt Gardner:

Long regarded as a monolith with predictable views on controversial issues affecting their profession, the nation’s 3.2 million teachers are increasingly split along generational lines. For reformers intent on improving the country’s 90,000 public schools, the division presents the possibility of change on an unprecedented scale.
Waiting to be Won Over,” a survey of 1,010 public school teachers in K-12 released in May by Education Sector, a nonpartisan think tank, concluded that the “loyalty of teachers is up for grabs.” It identified several key areas where the generational differences in attitudes among teachers offer the greatest potential for transforming the system. At the same time, however, it cautioned against stereotyping teachers by years of service.

Imperial College ditches A levels and sets its own entrance exam

Alexandra Frean:

One of Britain’s leading universities is to introduce an entrance exam for all students applying to study there from 2010 because it believes that A levels no longer provide it with a viable way to select the best students.
Sir Richard Sykes, Rector of Imperial College, London, suggested that grade inflation at A level meant that so many students now got straight As that it had become almost “worthless” as a way of discriminating between the talented and the well drilled.
Last year one in four A-level marks was a grade A and 10 per cent of A-level students achieved at least three As.
“We can’t rely on A levels any more. Everybody who applies has got three or four As. They [A levels] are not very useful. The International Baccalaureate is useful but again this is just a benchmark,” Sir Richard said.

The Enemy Within British Education

Melanie Phillips via a kind reader:

In my book All Must Have Prizes, first published in 1996, in which I charted the disintegration of education and deconstruction of knowledge in Britain, I noted that this onslaught had resulted from the hijack of education by left-wing ideologues hell-bent on destroying British society. These people were entrenched in university departments of education. So when the government tried to address education decline by imposing a national curriculum and turned to the ‘experts’ to help them do so, the people who wrote that curriculum and sat on the curriculum boards and other education quangos were the very people who were doing the damage in the first place.
Twelve years on, Britain’s education system has disintegrated yet further and exactly the same kind of people are doing the same damage. Today’s Daily Mail reports that Professor John White, who specialises in ‘the philosophy of education’ and a government adviser on curriculum reform, says that children should no longer be taught traditional subjects at school because they are ‘middle-class’ creations and ‘mere stepping stones to wealth’ and that lessons should teach ‘personal skills’ instead.

The professor believes the origins of our subject-based education system can be traced back to 19th century middle-class values. While public schools focused largely on the classics, and elementary schools for the working class concentrated on the three Rs, middle-class schools taught a range of academic subjects.
These included English, maths, history, geography, science and Latin or a modern language. They ‘fed into the idea of academic learning as the mark of a well-heeled middle- class’, he said last night. The Tories then attempted to impose these middle-class values by introducing a traditional subject-based curriculum in 1988. But this ‘alienated many youngsters, especially from disadvantaged backgrounds’, he claimed.

Computer program helps students shape their writing

Alan Borsuk:

If Alegra Holt had $100, she would spend $1 on candy, buy some clothes, give some to charity and see if she had enough left to buy a Chihuahua.
If Alegra had to write a short essay on what she’d do if she had $100, she’d sign on to a program called My Access, using a computer in the basement computer lab of Carleton Elementary School, 4116 W. Silver Spring Drive.
The 10-year-old fifth-grader at Carleton would fill in blanks in a “cluster web” on her screen to begin shaping her essay. From the central idea of using $100, she would put “buy candy” in one branch of the web, with what kind of candy or what store she’d go to in sub-branches, then do the same in other branches for her other plans.
Then she’d begin to type the assignment in sentences and paragraphs.

Hard work translates to success at La Tinaja school in Ocampo

Macarena Hernandez & Gary Jacobson:

The elementary school at La Tinaja — Escuela Primaria 18 de Marzo — is named after one of the most famous dates in Mexico history. On March 18, 1938, President Lazaro Cardenas nationalized the country’s oil industry, kicking out foreign-owned companies.
Principal Socorro Lara has been at the school 15 years and in the Ocampo municipality 35. She doubles as a teacher. In the mornings, she substitutes, and in the evenings, she teaches kids who are struggling.
There are a total of about 50 schools in Ocampo, and this is the best, municipality education official Jose Juan Salazar says.
Why?

Milwaukee Schools Ordered to Do More for Special needs

Alan Borsuk:

Jeffrey Spitzer-Resnick, the attorney representing the plaintiffs in the case, said Sunday that the decision will bring “the most substantial reform in MPS history,” one that will bring higher graduation rates, fewer discipline problems and improved test scores within a few a years.
MPS officials have fought the goals set forth in the decision of Federal Magistrate Judge Aaron Goodstein, saying they would lead to big increases in spending and taxes and actually harm children and lower educational standards. MPS spokeswoman Roseann St. Aubin said Superintendent William Andrekopoulos and School Board members had not yet seen the decision and did not want to comment until they met about it. She quoted Andrekopoulos saying only, “We’re going to continue to move forward with education reforms that meet the needs of all our children.”
Goodstein’s decision, signed Friday and circulated over the weekend, came down on every point in favor of the position of the plaintiffs, an organization now known as Disability Rights Wisconsin, and in favor of a settlement reached recently between that organization and the state Department of Public Instruction, which was also a defendant in the case. Goodstein rejected all grounds MPS offered for finding things wrong with that settlement.

On Arizona’s Proposed School District Consolidation

The Arizona Republic:

1. Given the high-interest and often emotionally charged and political topic of education and school districts, what has been your experience serving on the commission?
I think all of us on the Commission have been inspired by the commitment we’ve seen from parents and educators throughout Arizona to turning our system around so it can better serve our children. Their insights and input strongly shaped the recommendations we presented to Gov. Janet Napolitano last December. But make no mistake, change is hard and we expected some degree of resistance to our plan simply because it meant the end of the status quo. I am a little disappointed that some have rushed to judgment without fully investigating our proposals or considering the benefits of making better use of our precious educational resources. We hope to dispel some of these concerns this summer during a series of public forums that will be scheduled across the state.

Transforming Inner-City Schools To Train Tomorrow’s Work Force

Joe Barrett:

One day in August 2005, Dan Swinney went to the Chicago public schools for help in his crusade to revive manufacturing here. Instead, Mr. Swinney left his meeting with some homework: design a new high school to train the workers needed to make that revival happen.
This past fall, the school, Austin Polytechnical Academy, opened inside a building that had once housed a mammoth, violence-prone high school on the city’s struggling West Side. Now, Mr. Swinney, chairman of the Chicago Manufacturing Renaissance Council, has plans to open two more high schools and an elementary school in other areas of the city.
Mr. Swinney says American manufacturing is adapting to globalization by shifting to higher-value products. But with the baby boomers’ looming retirement, the education system isn’t producing the workers and managers needed to take over the highly skilled jobs that are most in demand.
“There’s a window that’s open that will allow us to sustain and expand our competitive advantage, but it’s only open for a few years,” Mr. Swinney says. Training poor students to fill these positions can “address deep social problems,” while giving industry the work force it needs.

Shameful effort to undermine charter school

San Jose Mercury News Editorial:

Leadership Public Schools’ longstanding battle with the Campbell Union High School District is over.
The district has won. Families of low-income Hispanics, whom the school was designed to serve, have lost.
The board of the non-profit San Francisco-based charter organization voted last week to shut down its Campbell high school after only two years of operation. Leadership is calling the closing a consolidation.
Students will be bused to Overfelt High in East San Jose, where Leadership has a 10-year lease from charter-welcoming East Side Union High School District.
But let’s be straight: This was sabotage by Campbell Union. And it points to weaknesses in the state law that says school districts must provide space to charter schools.
Proposition 39 requires that districts provide equivalent facilities, but only on a yearly basis. So many anti-charter districts, like Campbell, use the provision to give charters a literal run-around and force them to move every year.
Leadership opened two years ago with 120 ninth-graders in rented space at a church not far from Del Mar High, the target area where there was a concentration of long-under-served Hispanic children. (Perhaps showing the value of competition, Del Mar itself has made considerable strides in the past few years under Principal Jim Russell.)

Local Politics: Zig & Zag with the Madison Studio School.

2008 Public School Enrollment In U.S. Expected To Set Record

Maria Glod:

Public school enrollment across the country will hit a record high this year with just under 50 million students, and the student population is becoming more diverse in large part because of growth in the Latino population, according to a new federal report.
Nationwide, about 20 percent of students were Hispanic in 2006, the latest year for which figures were available for ethnic groups, up from 11 percent in the late 1980s. That trend is reflected in many Washington area schools. In Fairfax County, about 17 percent of students are Hispanic, jumping from about 4 percent two decades ago.
Overall, about 43 percent of the nation’s students are minorities, according to the Condition of Education, a congressionally mandated annual look at enrollment and performance trends in schools and colleges.

Fate of D.C. Voucher Program Darkens

Valerie Strauss & Bill Turque:

The groundbreaking federal voucher program that enables nearly 2,000 D.C. children to attend private schools is facing an uncertain future in the Democrat-controlled Congress and may well be heading into its final year of operation, according to officials and supporters of the program.
Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) said this week that she is working on a plan to phase out the controversial D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, the first in the country to provide federal money for vouchers. Norton said she wants to proceed in a way that will not harm recipients. But she added that she regarded the program, narrowly approved in 2004 for five years by the then-Republican majority, as on its last legs.
“We have to protect the children, who are the truly innocent victims here,” said Norton, who like many Democrats opposes vouchers as a threat to public school systems. “But I can tell you that the Democratic Congress is not about to extend this program.”

For English Studies, Koreans Say Goodbye to Dad

Norimitsu Onishi:

On a sunny afternoon recently, half a dozen South Korean mothers came to pick up their children at the Remuera Primary School here, greeting one another warmly in a schoolyard filled with New Zealanders.
The mothers, members of the largest group of foreigners at the public school, were part of what are known in South Korea as “wild geese,” families living separately, sometimes for years, to school their children in English-speaking countries like New Zealand and the United States. The mothers and children live overseas while the fathers live and work in South Korea, flying over to visit a couple of times a year.
Driven by a shared dissatisfaction with South Korea’s rigid educational system, parents in rapidly expanding numbers are seeking to give their children an edge by helping them become fluent in English while sparing them, and themselves, the stress of South Korea’s notorious educational pressure cooker.

Slowly but surely, universities in France—and across all of Europe—are reforming

The Economist:

BENEATH the medieval cloisters and bleak 1960s campuses of Europe’s universities, the ground is trembling. For years, Europeans have talked of doing something about higher education, so as to prepare better for the “knowledge economy”. But lingering taboos—over tuition fees, private finance, or competition—have inhibited the timid and frustrated the bold. Now, however, there are the first stirrings of genuine change.
The shortcomings of Europe’s universities are well-known. Only two European universities (Cambridge and Oxford) are in Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s global top 20. Europeans spend an average of $10,191 per student, measured at purchasing-power parity, next to $22,476 in America. They devote only 1.3% of GDP to higher education, compared with 2.9% in America, and—unlike in America—almost all of it is public money. Only 24% of working-age Europeans have a degree, compared with 39% of Americans. And Europe bags an ever-declining share of Nobel prizes.

New Orleans schools chief chips away at big issues

Becky Bohrer:

Paul Vallas recently passed his first major milestone when fourth- and eighth-graders in the city’s woeful public schools posted significantly higher test scores on state tests.
The superintendent of a 33-school district that includes many of New Orleans’ worst-performing schools has received mostly positive reviews after his first year on the job, but many challenges remain. Too many students continue to fail or not show up for classes, there’s limited funding for dilapidated buildings and the district needs to retain quality teachers.
Vallas, 54, was known as a hard-driving reformer in Chicago and Philadelphia. After a year as the Recovery School District superintendent in New Orleans, the tireless worker has lengthened class days, decreased class sizes and increased classroom technology. He also is helping create schools that revolve around themes like the arts and technology.
The public school system here is fractured. A handful of the city’s best-performing schools are run by a local board and not under Vallas’ control. Private organizations run a few dozen others as charter schools.
Money is limited. The district’s $260 million operating budget has no cash reserve, and decrepit school buildings need an estimated $1 billion for renovations.

Toledo Teachers’ Group Touts Peer Review

Claudio Sanchez:

Teachers’ unions are often blamed for protecting educators who are burned out or should never have been allowed to teach in the first place. But in Toledo, Ohio, the union has spearheaded a controversial policy to purge the school district of incompetent teachers. It’s called “peer review” and no school system in the country has been doing it longer than Toledo.

The school bully dilemma

Sharon Noguchi:

It started with four older girls calling her vulgar names, one pouring a bottle of water on her head, then yanking a fistful of hair from her scalp – right in the Los Gatos High School cafeteria.
It led to school authorities summoning police, suspending the lead bully, convening mediation sessions and checking in daily with the freshman who was bullied. The school even mapped routes around campus to ensure the antagonists remain apart after the victim’s parents took out a restraining order against their daughter’s harasser.
But at a time when awareness of harassment at schools seems to be growing, the Los Gatos incident underscores the difficulty of dealing with the problem: Short of kicking a bully out of school, even when educators do a lot they are often accused of doing too little to appease parents and ease victims’ fears.
“We’re trying to help on a daily basis,” Los Gatos-Saratoga Union School District Superintendent Cary Matsuoka said. “But there’s only so much we can control in the world of 14-, 15-year-old adolescents.”
Across the valley, parents of harassment victims insist school authorities don’t react quickly or forcefully enough to protect their children – even as school officials say they’re working harder than ever to prevent and respond to bullying and aggression.
Harassment peaks in middle school, the time when kids are sorting out themselves and their place in life. In California, 42 percent of seventh-graders, 38 percent of ninth-graders and 33 percent of 11th-graders reported being victims of harassment, according to the 2005-07 Healthy Kids survey.

Proposed West Bend School District Harassment Policy

Owen Robinson:

At tomorrow’s meeting of the West Bend School Board, they will he hearing the third reading and possibly passing a new harassment policy. This proposed policy goes way overboard. Here is the proposed policy:
Sorry for the images, but that’s all I have. A policy like this is a good idea. What constitutes harassment and what should be done about it should be defined to protect both the students and the faculty. But this policy is way too broad and fraught with problems. Let’s look at a couple of them. Here is the definition of “harassment:”

Harassment means verbal or physical conduct related to an individual’s membership in a protected class (including, but not limited to: sex, race, religion, national origin, ancestry, creed, pregnancy, marital or parental status, sexual orientation or physical, mental, emotional or learning disability) that has the purpose or effect of creating an intimidating, hostile, or offensive working or learning environment or interferes with the individual’s work or learning performance.

Candidates Are at Odds Over K-12
But McCain and Obama Both Back NCLB Goals

Alyson Klein and David J. Hoff:

The presumed November matchup produced by the long presidential-primary season that ended last week offers contrasting approaches to K-12 policy, along with some common ground on the basics of the No Child Left Behind Act.
Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican nominee, and Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, who last week secured enough delegates to claim the Democratic nomination, both express support for the nclb law’s goals and its use of testing to measure schools’ success.
But Sen. McCain would promote market forces as a way to spur school improvement, and would likely seek to freeze education spending as part of a review of the effectiveness of federal programs.
Sen. Obama, meanwhile, promises to search for new ways of assessing students and to invest significantly in efforts to improve teacher quality.
Although education wasn’t a prominent issue in the Democratic or Republican primaries, it could emerge more clearly in the general-election campaign, one political scientist said last week. He pointed particularly to the potential for a sharper focus on where the candidates stand on the requirements for testing and accountability under the NCLB law.

Related: On education, McCain & Obama may not be far apart. Obama advisor Jeanne Century: Why Education Reform is Like Baseball (Moneyball) and McCain advisor Lisa Graham Keegan: What is Public Education?

IS AP Good for Everyone?

Jay Matthews:

I am no match for Chester E. Finn Jr. in a debate. The president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and author of “Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik” (Princeton University Press) is feared by many ideological adversaries for his sharp wit and inexhaustible erudition. But I am taking him on anyway in this column because he suggested recently in his own weekly Gadfly column that I was promoting Advanced Placement courses for all students, even those unable or unwilling to handle their difficulties. I thought this would also be a good way to explore the limits of the movement to make high schools more challenging, a very lively issue in our highest-performing schools. Here we go:
Mathews: I want to get to the broader issues pretty quickly, but let’s deal first with your wicked poke in my ribs. I don’t believe I have ever said AP is for everyone. My view has always been that AP is for far more people than are allowed to, or encouraged to, enroll in AP (and International Baccalaureate) courses. There is lots of data to support this, including College Board analysis of PSAT scores showing two or three times as many people could handle and benefit from AP than actually take the course. Have you got a citation showing I said any such silly thing? If not, please debase yourself with an apology to my readers so we can get to the fascinating topic of how much AP and IB should kids have.

Related:

Harriet Johnson, 50, Activist for Disabled, Is Dead

Dennis Hevesi:

Harriet McBryde Johnson, a feisty champion of the rights of the disabled who came to prominence after she challenged a Princeton professor’s contention that severely disabled newborns could ethically be euthanized, died on Wednesday at her home in Charleston, S.C. She was 50.
No cause has been determined, her sister, Beth Johnson, said, while pointing out that her sister had been born with a degenerative neuromuscular disease. “She never wanted to know exactly what the diagnosis was,” Beth Johnson said.
The condition did not stop Harriet Johnson from earning a law degree, representing the disabled in court, lobbying legislators and writing books and articles that argued, as she did in The New York Times Magazine in February 2003, “The presence or absence of a disability doesn’t predict quality of life.”
Using a battery-powered wheelchair in which she loved to “zoom around” the streets of Charleston, Ms. Johnson playfully referred to herself as “a bedpan crip” and “a jumble of bones in a floppy bag of skin.”

Related: Doctors vs. Parents: Who Decides Right to Life?

Statistics Made Happily Real

Patrick McIlheran:

A new report says students in Milwaukee’s private choice high schools are much more likely to graduate: Such schools had a graduation rate of 85% last year, compared to 58% in the Milwaukee Public Schools.
In flesh-and-blood terms, that means Babatunde Saaka unexpectedly has a future.
The figures are the latest from what is now a five-year report by University of Minnesota sociologist John Robert Warren. Milwaukee students using vouchers are pulling farther ahead. If 2003’s MPS freshmen had done as well in 2007 as students in choice schools, there’d be 1,517 more high school graduates in Milwaukee.
That’s a theoretical number. In life, graduation is more concrete – do or don’t, succeed or fail.
Saaka once expected to fail. When the Milwaukee teen graduates from the Hope School this weekend as part of its first graduating class, he will be the first in his family merely to make it through high school. A young man who grew up in fatherless poverty, he’s going on to Wisconsin Lutheran College, planning to become a youth counselor, to make a difference for other poor children.

In Big Easy, Charter School Era

Jay Matthews:

The storm that swamped this city three years ago also effectively swept away a public school system with a dismal record and faint prospects of getting better. Before Hurricane Katrina, educator John Alford said, he toured schools and found “kids just watching movies” in classes where “low expectations were the norm.”
Now Alford is one of many new principals leading an unparalleled education experiment, with possible lessons for troubled urban schools in the District and elsewhere. New Orleans, in a post-Katrina flash, has become the first major city in which more than half of all public school students attend charter schools.
For these new schools with taxpayer funding and independent management, old rules and habits are out. No more standard hours, seniority, union contracts, shared curriculum or common textbooks. In are a crowd of newcomers — critics call them opportunists — seeking to lift standards and achievement. They compete for space, steal each other’s top teachers and wonder how it is all going to work.

Marquette Elementary School students bring flowers to residents at Karmenta Nursing and Rehabilitation Center

Devin Rose:


Norma Hanson, a resident at the Karmenta Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Madison, will turn 101 years old next week. This age is difficult to fathom, especially for a group of fifth-grade students.
Hanson and other residents at Karmenta were visited Thursday morning by the class from Marquette Elementary School in Madison, and both groups came away extremely happy.
“I think it was fantastic,” said Stacy Carlson, the students’ teacher at Marquette, about the group’s third visit to Karmenta. “I am so grateful that this all came together.”
With the help of the staff at Buffo Floral and Gifts, the students paired up with residents and made them flower bouquets, which the residents greatly appreciated.
“I love flowers!” Hanson said, adding she also loved the homemade birthday card all the kids signed for her.
Fifth-grader James Strebe said it was “really fun” to interact with all the people even thought he admitted he’s “not much of a flower person.”

Leftist thinking left off the syllabus

Marla Dickerson:

Leftist ideology may be gaining ground in Latin America. But it will never set foot on the manicured lawns of Francisco Marroquin University.
For nearly 40 years, this private college has been a citadel of laissez-faire economics. Here, banners quoting “The Wealth of Nations” author Adam Smith“>Adam Smith — he of the powdered wig and invisible hand — flutter over the campus food court.
Every undergraduate, regardless of major, must study market economics and the philosophy of individual rights embraced by the U.S. founding fathers, including “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
A sculpture commemorating Ayn Rand’sAtlas Shrugged” is affixed to the school of business. Students celebrated the novel’s 50th anniversary last year with an essay contest. The $200 cash prize reinforced the book’s message that society should reward capitalist go-getters who create wealth and jobs, not punish them with taxes and regulations.

A Goal of 100%

Maureen Downey:

Next time it rewrites its statewide standardized math test, the state Department of Education might consider this challenging question:
With a statewide high school graduation rate of 58.1 percent in 2005 and an improvement rate of 2.6 percentage points over the previous five years, when can Georgia expect to achieve a 100 percent graduation rate?
Answer: 2110.
One hundred and two years is a long, long time —- too long, in fact. But with the sluggish response of state leaders to holistic and meaningful education reform, accelerating that time frame will be very difficult.
While Gov. Sonny Perdue has introduced graduation coaches to identify and deflect potential dropouts in high school, there’s far more to be done to reclaim children in the early grades, where most kids wander off track. And rather than whittling away at instructional funding, as Georgia has done in recent years, the state ought to be investing in programs to prepare low-income 3-year-olds for school and to help struggling third-graders learn to read.
To truly transform its low-performing schools, Georgia has to take an honest look at its financial commitment to education. That starts with the governor, who continues to maintain that his administration has not shortchanged education and is, in fact, spending more than ever on a per-pupil basis.

Three Child Psychiatry Experts at Harvard Made Millions from Drug Makers

Gardiner Harris & Benedict Carey:

A world-renowned Harvard child psychiatrist whose work has helped fuel an explosion in the use of powerful antipsychotic medicines in children earned at least $1.6 million in consulting fees from drug makers from 2000 to 2007 but for years did not report much of this income to university officials, according to information given Congressional investigators.
By failing to report income, the psychiatrist, Dr. Joseph Biederman, and a colleague in the psychiatry department at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Timothy E. Wilens, may have violated federal and university research rules designed to police potential conflicts of interest, according to Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa. Some of their research is financed by government grants.
Like Dr. Biederman, Dr. Wilens belatedly reported earning at least $1.6 million from 2000 to 2007, and another Harvard colleague, Dr. Thomas Spencer, reported earning at least $1 million after being pressed by Mr. Grassley’s investigators. But even these amended disclosures may understate the researchers’ outside income because some entries contradict payment information from drug makers, Mr. Grassley found.

As the economy hits rough waters, competition is surging for beach lifeguard jobs. Three rookies join the race for a role in a real-life ‘Baywatch.’

Ellen Gamerman:

After the first run on the first day of Los Angeles County’s lifeguard-training academy, a rookie throws up, walks off the beach and quits.
None of the other recruits turn to look. L.A. lifeguard training is run with military discipline, and one rule is, always face the water. The class stands frozen in squad formation. No one wants to risk his or her chances just to watch a defeated rookie slink away.
This will be a tough summer to land any good job, and for lifeguards, the competition is especially fierce. In South Walton, on the Florida Panhandle, lifeguard applications have risen 30% in the past year, boosted by older recruits with military and law-enforcement experience. In Volusia County, Fla., there were 60 openings this year compared with 80 last year, in part because college graduates are returning to their old summer posts after striking out in the bleak job market. “The economy is not as good as it once was, and that’s helping us recruit,” says Kevin Sweat, the county director of beach safety.
Lifeguarding is no longer a summer pastime for bored teens. Pay and benefits have grown as more cities merge their lifeguards into the fire department. L.A. County employs 180 full-time and 760 part-time lifeguards, with top pay pushing six figures.

Why Education Reform is Like Baseball

Jeanne Century (an adviser to Obama’s 2008 campaign):

Moneyball tells about a system that did not want to change; of practices held steadfast in tradition; and of how a leader, with the right motivation and insight, innovated for success. So, as this season winds down and you sit watching nine innings, consider these nine lessons for educators drawn from an unlikely place: America’s simple favorite pastime—baseball.
1. Don’t go for the home runs … just get on base and the rest will come. Beane didn’t win baseball games by hoping for home runs. Home runs are rare, and hope doesn’t win games. He understood that individual players don’t win games; teams do—when they work together in a process of creating runs. In education, we identify isolated strategies that we hope will be our home runs. But experience tells us that a better approach is to get solidly and clearly “on base.” Then, the system can work, each piece supporting the other, stepping up when necessary and stepping back to “sacrifice” if that is what will win the game. The only way the system can work is if everyone buys in and does his or her part.
2. Money is important, but it is not the answer. Beane had to spend his team’s meager $40 million wisely; other clubs had several times that amount. So he set out to identify ways he could use his money more efficiently. As Lewis writes, “[I]n professional baseball it still matters less how much money you have than how well you spend it.” Instead of investing in one big star, Beane sought out those players who were regularly and consistently getting on base (see lesson one). We in education need to find ways to get on base. Small steps are enough if they are consistent and well informed. The smartest strategies don’t necessarily cost the most money. Indeed, some of them don’t cost anything at all.

Related: On education, McCain & Obama may not be far apart.

What is Public Education?

Lisa Graham Keegan – an adviser to McCain’s 2008 campaign:

One constant cry in the debate over educational reform is that we must save our public schools. But proponents of that argument assume that a public school system must be exactly what we have today: schools clustered in districts governed by centralized bureaucracies that oversee every detail of what goes on in individual schools, from budgets to personnel to curricula. That’s like saying that our steel industry should center on open-hearth furnaces and giant corporations rather than the nimble mini-mills that have largely superseded them. Let’s agree, for argument, that a public school system is a good thing: but why should it look just like it does today—which is what it looked like 50 years ago?
There’s nothing sacrosanct, after all, about the current structure of our public education system. Its roots go back to the nineteenth century, when a geographical community would club together to hire and pay a teacher and later, when things got more complicated, would tax property to provide a local school and then appoint or elect a few people to a small board that would oversee it and hire its teacher. As the communities grew into towns and cities, it seemed logical to expand the governing mechanisms already in place. Tiny school boards slowly swelled into today’s bloated and dysfunctional school districts, responsible for running not one but 5 or 25 or 50 schools.
If we want to save the public schools, we mustn’t confuse the ideal of public education—that every child has the right to a good K-12 education at public expense—with any particular system, including the one we’ve got. Surely we can come up with a modernized definition of public education fit for a new millennium. In Arizona, where I’m Superintendent of Public Instruction, that’s just what we’re trying to achieve. Our new approach, aimed at shifting power from bureaucrats to students and families, has three key, equally essential parts: student-centered funding, parental choice, and tough, objectively measurable, standards.
Start with student-centered funding. In Arizona, we’ve all but replaced an older and more typical system, in which school districts assess and use local property taxes to fund schools, with one in which the state raises the money (including for capital construction) through a statewide tax, straps an equal amount of it to each student’s back, and releases it only when he walks into the school of his choice.
Today’s district is a rigid command-and-control system that offers dissatisfied parents no choices except, if they don’t like the district school, to send their kids to private school or to home-school them. Moreover, like the Soviet Union with its five-year plans, the districts do a poor job of management, for the reason F. A. Hayek pointed out: command-and-control systems suffer from an information deficit. How can a distant district office bureaucrat know how to run a school better than the principals and teachers who work there? Too often, the district just lays down a single set of policies to govern all its schools, imposing one-size-fits-all curricula and disciplinary policies on schools that may have very different needs. The system also seems impervious to reform from within. In my experience, those who join district boards, even those who start out reform-minded, eerily become co-opted and wind up defending the system tooth and nail. It’s just like watching Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
If you need an additional reason to abolish the traditional property-tax funding system, consider this: it’s unfair. Funding education through local property taxes is deeply regressive. It lets rich districts spend more per pupil, at much lower tax rates, than poor districts. After all, a rich district’s citizens who pay $3,000 per year on their $300,000 houses are paying 10 percent in taxes; the poor district’s citizens who pay $1,200 on their $100,000 houses are paying 12 percent.

The Green Bay School District, currently run by incoming Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad spent $11,441 per student ($232,232,000 total budget) in 2006/2007 while Madison spent $12,422 per student ($329,596,000 total budget) during the same period according to School Facts 2007 by WISTAX.
A few other interesting comparisons between the Districts (2006/2007):

Equity Fund Balance Enrollment Low Income Staff % Revenues from Property Taxes
Green Bay $21,900,000 (9.3%) 19,863 44.9% 2445.6 31.8%
Madison $18,437,000 (6%) 24,908 44.1% 3544.6 67.9%

Related: On education, McCain & Obama may not be far apart.

On education, McCain & Obama may not be far apart

Greg Toppo:

Jeanne Century, director of Science Education, Research and Evaluation at the University of Chicago’s Center for Elementary Mathematics and Science Education (CEMSE), is an adviser to Obama. Lisa Graham Keegan, the former superintendent of public instruction in Arizona and a two-term member of the Arizona House of Representatives, has McCain’s ear on educational issues.
To anyone casually observing the two in an effort to divine differences between the candidates, the disagreements seemed small.

  • Both Obama and McCain believe in rigorous standards and rich curricula to help students compete in a global economy. Century even suggested that American kids should be “trilingual,” not just bilingual, to compete with the rest of the world.
  • Both candidates support publicly funded, but privately run, charter schools.
  • For now at least, both oppose using taxpayer dollars for large-scale voucher programs. (In a later session with reporters, though, Keegan pointed out that McCain actually supported the push in 2003 for a small-scale voucher that now operates in Washington, D.C., public schools. She added that if a state asked McCain to support a voucher program, “he might be supportive.” But she said he doesn’t currently support changing the provisions of No Child Left Behind to allow for private school vouchers. Currently, students in under-performing schools can get taxpayer dollars for free tutoring or transfer to a better-performing public school.)
  • Speaking of No Child Left Behind, both candidates would tweak it in ways that, for the most part, only education wonks can appreciate. They’d both fund it differently. Keegan says McCain would figure out more efficient, focused ways to spend what she says is NCLB’s “unprecedented” increase in funding to schools. Century says Obama believes NCLB “was insufficiently funded and poorly implemented.”

They both bemoan the law’s inability to ensure that low-income children get high-quality teachers and they’d both push for so-called “value added” provisions that would give schools credit for test score gains that children make each year, even if all children don’t meet a pre-set proficiency goal in reading or math.

Ninety-four-year-old to graduate from high school

Linda Stewart Ball:

Ridgell M. McKinney is ready to cross the stage and get his high school diploma, 74 years after his classmates made the same walk.
McKinney, 94, would have graduated in 1934 had he been willing to rat out a friend. Chalk it up to honor and a case of wrongly accused popped knuckles.
As it is, the active nonagenarian and local historian was to be the first in line when diplomas from the new McKinney Boyd High School were awarded Friday night.
McKinney is a descendant of Collin McKinney, for whom both the town and Collin County, the wealthiest in Texas, are named. His great-great grandfather also helped pen the Texas Declaration of Independence that cast off Mexican rule in 1836.
So folks in this fast-growing suburb north of Dallas are making a fuss about McKinney’s commencement.

Finland’s schools may lead the world, but its universities are nothing special

The Economist:

This bothers the Finnish government. “As a country that thinks its future is purely dependent on its know-how, we cannot afford average results in universities,” says Jyrki Katainen (pictured), the finance minister.
This is my last appointment before I fly back to London, and Mr Katainen is telling me that his government thinks greater independence and a bit of capital may help the country’s universities to specialise and innovate. So it has offered any universities willing to set up charitable foundations a deal too good to refuse: any money they raise by 2010, the government will top up by 2.5 times as much.
Finland is hardly the only country worried about the global reputation of its universities. As with schools, the advent of international rankings has made list-watchers of everyone. The Shanghai Jiao Tong and THE rankings are enormously important both for universities, which are increasingly reliant on international students, and for countries, who take their positions on the charts quite seriously.

Robert F. Kennedy at the 1965 Hearings about the Elementary and Secondary Education Act

Jenny D:

In honor of RFK on the 40th anniversary of his death, I offer excerpts from the transcripts of the hearings on ESEA in 1965. RFK called for accountability among educators and proposed national testing to make sure that those receiving federal funds were using it improve student learning.
He proposed NCLB 35 years before Bush did. To be fair, NCLB is just the reauthorization of ESEA with a new name.
It was conceived to send federal dollars to offer more educational opportunities to disadvantaged students, and was packaged as part of LBJ’s larger War on Poverty. Student failure in school was linked to adult poverty, so Congress got to work to pass Johnson’s bill to help educate poor kids.
This is from the hearing on ESEA, by the Senate Education subcommittee, 89th Congress. Congress was considering whether to spend an additional $1 billion in the following year to improve education, which would double federal spending on schools. Most of the additional money would go to Title I.

Mary Olsky, EAGLE School co-founder, decides to retire

Kurt Gutknecht:

Twenty-six years ago, Mary Olsky was looking for a more challenging educational environment for her children. What ultimately happened has helped thousands of students over the years.
“I didn’t see this happening,” she said recently of Eagle School, which she co-founded with Betty Connor in 1982. Olsky is stepping down as co-director of the school, which now has 182 students, 20 teachers and six to 10 parent aides, and an expansive building at 5454 Gunflint Trail in Fitchburg.
In the 1980s, Olksy had recently moved to the Madison area with her husband and four children, ages 4 to 10, from Chicago. She thought Madison would provide a better educational environment for her children, but was disappointed.
Shortly after meeting Connor, they visited several schools around the country and rented a room in Hoyt School, which the district had closed and was renting rooms to a variety of organizations. They collected materials from a variety of sources and started with 12 students, including two of her children.
By 1985, they had outgrown their space and moved to another former school in Madison. One of the parents was a developer and helped them purchase land and build a school in Middleton. After adding two additions, they purchased land in Fitchburg and constructed the current building.
“We had sworn that we’d never have more than 100 kids or build our own building. What happened has become part of our general philosophy, which is to see problems and try to solve them instead of being rigid,” Olsky.

Milwaukee’s $1.2 Billion School Budget increases by 0.25%

Alan Borsuk:

A $1.2 billion budget that would keep trends generally on the same track in Milwaukee Public Schools for the coming school year was advanced early Wednesday by the Milwaukee School Board budget committee.
Those trends include substantial declines in enrollment, tightening services in many schools and an ever-growing portion of students with special needs.
hey also include increased emphasis on math instruction, health services for students and nutrition programs, including widely available free breakfast.
Board members and administrators avoided making any projections on the property tax implications of the budget, leaving that highly charged matter to the fall, when the proposal will be revised to reflect the state of finances just before property tax bills are calculated.
The proposal made in April by Superintendent William Andrekopoulos was in line with a directive from the School Board that the increase in total spending on operations be held to 0.25% for next year.

Related:

Kenosha District losing money on investment

Amy Hetzner:

A controversial investment to help fund retiree benefits has cost the Kenosha Unified School District $214,000 more than it has earned since 2006, according to an analysis by an independent consultant for the Pleasant Prairie School Commission.
Those losses will continue to mount, by about $52,000 per quarter, unless the investment’s value rebounds or the district shores up the investment by contributing millions of dollars more, the analysis found.
“People who got into this should have realized there were some flaws in the program,” said Gene Schulz with financial adviser Piper Jaffray & Co. to the commission Thursday. “I’m assuming they never even knew these flaws existed.”
Officials with Kenosha and four other Wisconsin school districts that invested millions of borrowed dollars in collateralized debt obligations to help fund employee retiree benefits have insisted they protected themselves in the deals. CDOs are bundles of debt that can range from corporate bonds to subprime mortgages

Fairfax County Schools Report on Student Behavior

Michael Alison Chandler:

Fairfax County School Board members said they are likely to abandon a staff report that showed racial and ethnic gaps in some measures of student behavior, including in the demonstration of “sound moral character and ethical judgment.”
The board had delayed an April vote to approve the report after concerns were raised that findings were based on subjective measures, such as elementary report card data, and that they would fuel negative stereotypes.
Board member Phillip A. Niedzielski-Eichner (Providence) said yesterday that he plans to propose at a June 19 meeting that a vote on the report be postponed indefinitely. Several board members have indicated their support, he said.
Board member Martina A. Hone (At Large) said that the original report is “fatally flawed” and that it doesn’t make sense “to work on fixing it.” She said she is pleased with the way the board is rethinking it. “I think we have come out a stronger school board,” she said.

Fearing for Massachusetts School Reform

via a kind reader’s email – David A. Mittell, Jr., a fascinating look at the political sausage making and special interests behind, or blocking school “reform”:

THE (Deval) PATRICK administration is big on reform when it comes to organizational charts, which in the to and fro of politics are accidents of history; are aesthetically displeasing to social scientists; and more often than not downright inefficient. It is the last point that deserves attention. The Patrick administration seems partly inhabited by people concerned with the second point and partly by people impatient for more power to do what they want by direct administrative order, rather than having to cajole semi-autonomous boards and authorities.
Mitt Romney had plans along the same lines and was pleased with himself when, early in his term, he was able to persuade the legislature to eliminate the notoriously inefficient Metropolitan District Commission and transfer its functions to the Department of Conservation and Recreation. How much actual efficiency was achieved is debatable.
Mr. Romney also tried to eliminate the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority. As a Republican governor he had no chance of eradicating this termites’ nest, despite its many public failings. Thereafter, wisely, he resolved to do what he could with the rusty tools that hehad. The danger of persisting in trying to clean up the flow chart in the face of political opposition was that, even had he succeeded to some extent, he would have spent his whole term doing it. Redirectin the mission of state government would have been lost.
With more than a third of his own term gone by, Mr. Patrick faces the same conundrum. He too wants to put the Turnpike Authority and all other transportation-related agencies under his direct control. That will need a column of its own. Here I want to deal with his partly completed effort to put all education-related agencies under his control.
Critics, especially those concerned about the foundering success of the Education Reform Act of 1993, see an attempt by the governor to gut the aspects of education reform that his political supporters in the education establishment do not like. On a partial list of suspected “gutters” are assorted state bureaucrats, the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents and the Massachusetts Teachers’ Association.
That’s not my list and I do not endorse it. But the evidence to date is that the critics have the politics right. Not only does Governor Patrick seem to be moving to quash some of the most hopeful aspects of education reform, appointed minions are acting on his behalf in petty and vindictive ways:

Continue reading Fearing for Massachusetts School Reform

Toyota Chief: Refrain from Using PowerPoint

Garr Reynolds:

An article that got some attention in Japan last week was this one (in Japanese), which says the Toyota Motor Corporation CEO Katsuaki Watanabe urged employees to show self-restraint and stop the wasteful practice of using PowerPoint for the creation of documents (what I call slideuments). The CEO made this statement while talking about the need to reduce costs at Toyota. He is reminding employees to be cost conscious and he used the practice of using PowerPoint as an example of waste. Watanabe said that (in the good old days?) they used to use one piece of paper to make a clear point or proposal, or to summarize an issue, but now everything is in PowerPoint, he says, which uses many sheets of paper and expensive colors…but it’s a waste. The CEO is not saying that PowerPoint is necessarily harmful (he does not mention its use for actual presentations), but he is saying printed “documents” made with the presentation tool tend to have less content, less clarity, and yet use more paper/ink and take more time. In the context of a challenging economy and an atmosphere of reducing costs, what would you say of any business practice that (1) takes more time, (2) costs more money, and yet (3) appears to be less effective? In the spirit of kaizen (continuous improvement), even if the waste is small, it must be eliminated.

The Poverty of PowerPoint by Gregory McNamee:

Many forces are at work in the dumbing-down of the world: censorship, historical amnesia, the collapse of general education, doctrinaire domination of the airwaves and other media outlets, the spread of religious fundamentalism, creationism, and other forms of ignorance.
And then there’s PowerPoint.
Microsoft’s market-leading “slideware”—software that produces virtual transparencies for use in public presentations—is responsible for “trillions of slides each year,” writes the statistician, publisher, and design guru Edward R. Tufte in his provocative booklet The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. And not just any old slides. PowerPoint’s popular templates, Tufte argues, are responsible for an explosion in useless data stupidly displayed, for these ready-made designs “usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis.”

What happened after California abolished bilingual education

The Economist:

TEN years to the day after California banned teaching in any language other than English, Erlinda Paredes runs through a new sentence with her kindergarten class. “El payaso se llama Botones”, she intones—“the clown’s name is Buttons”. When a pupil asks a question in English, she responds in Spanish. It is an improbable scene. But the abolition of bilingual education has not worked out in quite the way anybody expected.
Before 1998 some 400,000 Californian children were shunted into classes where they heard as little as 30 minutes of English each day. The hope was that they would learn mathematics and other subjects in their native tongue (usually Spanish) while they gently made the transition to English. The result was an educational barrio. So that year Ron Unz, a software engineer, sponsored a ballot measure that mandated teaching in English unless parents demanded otherwise. Proposition 227 passed easily, with considerable support from Hispanics. Voters in two other states, Massachusetts and Arizona, have since followed suit.
In Santa Ana, a mostly poor Latino city in Orange county, the number of children in bilingual classes promptly halved. Demand would have been even less had schools not prodded parents to request waivers for their children. In the past few years demand for bilingual education has fallen further. This year 22,000 pupils in Santa Ana are enrolled in “structured English immersion” programmes, where they hear little but that language. Just 646 are taught bilingually.

Follow the Special Ed Money

Joanne Jacobs:

Jay Greene is dubious about Response To Intervention — trying to educate children well so they’re not diagnosed as learning disabled — because he thinks schools have an incentive to put kids in special ed.

Essentially, RTI frees-up money to get schools to do what they presumably should have been doing already — providing well-designed instruction in the early grades. Unless we think that the main impediment to well-designed instruction was that schools lacked the funding to do it, diverting 15% of special education money to early-grade instruction will not get them to do anything significantly different from what they were already doing.

More on Finland’s Schools

The Economist:

THE OECD’s PISA studies are exhibit A for the excellence of Finland’s schools. Finland routinely comes top, or occasionally second, in tests every three years of 15-year-olds’ abilities in reading, mathematics and science. It is impressive, but the suspicious-minded (or perhaps just the begrudgers?) wonder if it is really all down to brilliant schools.
I have a suspicion of my own. When I lived in Finland in the 1990s I learnt rather little Finnish (they speak great English, and I’m lazy), but I learnt to read words and say them correctly in about half an hour. Each letter corresponds to one sound, and only one; there are no exceptions and no combinations of letters that make different sounds, like “sh” or “th”. If a letter is repeated, it is simply said for twice as long. Is it, perhaps, just easier to learn to read and write in Finland than practically anywhere else?

A School Milwaukee’s District Could Learn From

Dolores Herbstreith:

There is a school on Milwaukee’s near south side that should be a beacon of light to the many schools in the Milwaukee Public Schools that are having trouble keeping about 50% of their students in attendance and graduating.
It is Notre Dame Middle School, a Catholic school for girls in fifth through eighth grade. I tutored there for almost two years, and it was a great experience.
The school accepts Hispanic girls from that area who have spent the first few years of elementary school at MPS. Few come from what could be called “advantaged” homes. Most struggle with their studies. Many of them speak only Spanish at home because that is the only language their parents know. Then they must adjust to English the next morning when they return to school.
In spite of these challenges, the school shows an impressive record, with 96% of the girls graduating from high school after they leave Notre Dame and 76% of those continuing with a post-secondary education. How do they do it when more advantaged students drop out of school rather than apply themselves

S.F. voters OK $198 parcel tax for schools

Jill Tucker:

San Francisco teachers hoping for a significant pay raise celebrated Tuesday night as 70 percent of city voters passed a $198 annual school parcel tax.
Proposition A, which required two-thirds voter support to pass, had 80,000 yes votes to 35,000 no votes with all precincts reporting.
The parcel tax was one of 16 Bay Area school measures on Tuesday’s ballot, including 10 parcel taxes, which all require two-thirds support, and six facilities bonds, which need 55 percent of the yes votes to pass.
Late in the evening, 10 of those measures were winning.
San Francisco’s 20-year parcel tax will pump about $29 million into city schools each year – primarily improving teacher pay and training as well as increasing funding for technology and local charter schools.
The parcel tax kicks in on July 1 and expires in 2028.

Meaningful school funds reform talk

Wisconsin Senator Dale Schultz:

Wisconsin devotes nearly 50 percent of all state general tax dollars to the purpose of educating students. A top goal for me is to ensure the public schools of our region receive their fair share of that state aid. As state and local budgets tighten and competition for resources intensifies, our mutual goal will be to protect education funding so our youth are prepared for success and we continue to attract top-notch educators.
A group I helped form in 2006 reviewed our current funding system and recommended fixes to help our schools. That nonpartisan committee had broad representation, including school administrators, board members, UW researchers and legislators. Gary Andrews and Nancy Hendrickson from our region graciously provided strong voices for the interests of small, rural districts.
It was gratifying when some concepts advanced by the committee became provisions in the state budget, including easing state aid losses when student enrollment declines. Committee members showed that a focus on solutions without divisive bickering can produce real-world, helpful ideas.
I hope that same spirit of compromise carries over to next session. It’s encouraging to see renewed interest at the Capitol to tackle school funding reform in 2009. Governor Jim Doyle in his State of the State address early this year signaled his willingness to participate in school funding talks. I appreciate his willingness to lead and look forward to joining him to improve how our schools are funded.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate.

Real World Skills School Projects

Anita Clark:

When a local businessman asked teacher Dick Anderson if his woods technology students could build a covered bridge, Anderson said “sure.”
He envisioned an ornamental garden structure.
Instead, what the client wanted — and what the high school students built — is a 14-ton, 44-foot long timber-frame covered bridge that spans a ravine and can carry fully loaded trucks.

$10M for Math in Milwaukee

Alan Borsuk:

Milwaukee Public Schools officials got the assurance they were seeking when Gov. Jim Doyle said Wednesday that he will release $10 million to improve math instruction in Milwaukee next year.
Although the money was included in the budget approved last fall, Doyle had the option of not awarding it. After Doyle used his veto powers recently to require a $270 million cut in spending next year, MPS leaders were concerned the $10 million might be chopped.
Doyle used an eighth-grade classroom at the Lincoln Center of the Arts, an MPS middle school on the lower east side, to announce he was awarding the money, which is to be used to pay for more than 100 math teaching positions.

High school, city farm to build “green” garage

Karen Herzog:

A partnership between a city farm and a Milwaukee trade school will build an urban agricultural training space atop a “green” garage in the Riverwest neighborhood, complete with year-round, rooftop garden.
The project, called Growing Spaces, is a joint venture of the non-profit farm Growing Power Inc., 5500 West Silver Spring Road, and Bradley Tech High School, 700 S. 4th St. Details are to be announced at a 3 p.m. press conference today at the school.
Bradley Tech seniors in carpentry, electrical and plumbing classes will build the 3.5-bay garage beside a private home in Riverwest, starting in the fall. The homeowner, Kate Halfwassen, will coordinate the project and lease the garage back to Growing Power in what amounts to at least a five-year donation of the space, Halfwassen said Tuesday.

On Finland’s Schools

The Economist:

I AM feeling nostalgic. I spent two years in Finland in the late 1990s on a European Union post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Jyvaskyla in central Finland, and haven’t been back since. I wonder how much things will have changed—the country had only just joined the European Union back then, and has since joined the euro and experienced an economic boom.
First stop this morning is Kulosaari comprehensive school, in a suburb of Helsinki. Finnish comprehensives teach children from seven to 16; after that almost all youngsters spend another three years in either grammar or vocational schools.
Kulosaari school is lovely. The children are calm (far calmer than those at my son’s primary school in Cambridge, England) and talk to adults respectfully, but as equals.
Dan Wood, from Maidstone in England, one of two native English speakers on the staff, teaches children in the school’s bilingual programme. He has been in Finland for ten years now, and has no intention of leaving. “My mum works in a school at home,” he tells me. “I really just don’t want to go back to that system, the stress of school inspections.”

Seattle School Board’s New Goals

Linda Shaw:

The Seattle School Board approved a five-year plan Wednesday that sets specific targets for raising test scores, graduation rates and even the number of credits earned by ninth-graders.
By 2012, for example, the district wants 88 percent of third-graders to pass reading on the Washington Assessment of Student Learning, and 95 percent of the 10th-graders to do the same. Some of the most ambitious goals are in math and science, especially a passage rate of 80 percent on the science section of the 10th-grade WASL. In spring 2007, 33 percent passed.
To reach those and other goals, the plan calls for everything from better math and science instruction, to more consistency in what’s taught from school to school, more tests to track student progress, and hiring teachers earlier so classes don’t start the year with substitutes.
District officials have described the goals as ambitious, but achievable. And some of the most ambitious ones simply match what’s required under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, or reflect increasingly tough graduation requirements for high-school students.
Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson at Wednesday’s School Board meeting said her plan doesn’t cover everything, but that a strategic plan is meant to focus on “deficits.”

Education in Sweden

The Economist:

I SPEND my second day in Sweden with representatives of Kunskapsskolan, Sweden’s biggest chain of independent schools (it has 21 secondaries and 9 gymnasiums). It has recently been awarded a contract to open two “academies”—independent state schools—in London, and I have been intrigued by what I’ve heard about its highly personalised teaching methods.
At Kunskapsskolan Enskede, a few kilometres from the centre of Stockholm, I am met by Christian Wetell, its head teacher, and Kenneth Nyman, the company’s regional chief. They explain the “voucher system” from which they make their money. For each pupil the school teaches, it receives from the local government what it would have spent educating the pupil in one of its own schools; in return, independent schools cannot charge anything extra, and must accept all students who apply. Provided schools follow Sweden’s national curriculum, they have wide latitude in their methods and pacing.
Kenneth sheds an interesting light on the thorny comparison with Finland. You have to look, he says, at what sort of students each country’s system wants. Sweden aims to produce socially conscious generalists. The Finnish system, by contrast, drives rather narrowly at academic success.

Referendum’s Reprise

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Editorial:

Faced with growing numbers of students, what should school officials in Hartford and Germantown do to provide adequate school facilities?
One is tempted to ask just what part of “no” school officials in Germantown and Hartford don’t understand.
Faced with the rejection by voters of a school building referendum in April, the Germantown School Board probably will try again in November with the same referendum. Meanwhile, in Hartford, officials haven’t given up their quest for a new school despite being shot down twice – in November and April referendum balloting – by a 2-1 or better ratio.
Some consider their efforts arrogance and a slap in the face to voters. Maybe. But maybe it’s a sincere attempt to find the best answer to a simple challenge faced by both communities.
Germantown and Hartford schools are a part of growing communities that every year are adding more subdivisions with families that include children. Those kids have to be educated somewhere. And as families grow, classrooms grow and become crowded. School officials in both districts contend that they need new elementary schools to cope with that growth.

Hard to find a job, but not an internship

Tami Luhby:

Even as they trim their payrolls, companies are keeping one eye on the future by stocking up on summer interns.
Employers, in a sign that they are looking beyond the current economic slowdown, are using intern programs to help build their junior ranks. Certainly interns can provide cheap and eager labor. But they also bring fresh ideas and allow companies to build their talent pools, experts said. Firms are hiring a larger number of their entry-level workers from their intern pool, so they are looking to lure top college students well before graduation.
“We’re seeing growth every year in the number of interns being hired,” said Camille Luckenbaugh, research director for the National Association of Colleges and Employers. “One reason companies are looking to hire is to fill their talent pipeline. They are looking five to 10 years down the road.”

Experimental audio/visual therapies help some schools teach students to focus

Greg Toppo:

A small but growing number of schools are using experimental therapies to retrain students’ hearing and vision, in essence reteaching them to hear and see. It’s a bid to reverse problems with the ability to focus and learn brought on by years of excessive TV, poor nutrition and, for some, in vitro drug exposure.
At Gordon Parks Elementary School, a charter school in Kansas City, Mo., 60% of kindergartners in 2004 failed a visual-skills test. Most had 20/20 vision, but they struggled to focus on moving objects, track lines of print and refocus from near to far.
That fall, Gordon Parks began regular lessons in visual skills. Therapist Cheryl Steffenella says dangerous neighborhoods and the ubiquity of TV and video games means many of her students “aren’t doing kid things” — climbing trees, jumping and running — that help develop visual and motor skills. Even playing video games that require a lot of eye movement exercises children’s vision minimally, she says.

Education Stories, Inspiring or Otherwise

Samuel Freedman:

In the season of sheepskin and mortarboard, report card and honor roll, I have reached my own commencement. After four years, this is my last education column, as I move on to other journalistic endeavors.
The greatest gifts this assignment gave me were a passport to watch the magic of the classroom and the opportunity to join in a public discussion. Again and again, I saw how a school can contain the whole world. I think of the football team at Dearborn High, in a Detroit suburb with a large Arab-American community. There, several dozen Muslim players faithfully held to the Ramadan fast while making a successful run to the state playoffs in 2005. The Middle East met Middle America, and there was no clash of civilizations about it.
I think, too, about the students at Stanford who shed the cocoon of their affluent privilege to tutor the university’s custodians, many of them immigrants from Mexico, in the English language. The instruction went both ways, as the students discovered firsthand the sacrifice and integrity of those otherwise invisible men and women who collected their trash.

Prevention called cure for school violence

Liz Bowie:

Communities and schools should take a preventive approach to school violence rather than focus solely on punishing students who have behavior problems, experts said yesterday at a summit on school violence.
Students are looking for structure, high academic expectations, and teachers who understand and can communicate with them, said Ivan J. Juzang, a consultant who gave the keynote address at the daylong meeting at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Providing those basics will make schools safer, he said.
The summit was organized by Rep. Elijah E. Cummings and State Superintendent of Schools Nancy S. Grasmick after several high-profile incidents of violence in schools this year, including the beating of a Baltimore teacher that became nationwide news after it was recorded on a student’s cell phone and posted on the Internet.
The summit was called to find solutions to the problems of school violence, but the conversation among participants and speakers focused more broadly on the need to intervene in the lives of troubled children as early as elementary school. The participants included legislators, teachers, school board members, community leaders, parents and students from across the state.

Related:

MMSD Retirees — A Season of Thanks

In case you haven’t seen it yet, here is a link to the list of MMSD teachers, administrators and staff who will be retiring at the end of the year. Take a look and see if maybe your child’s favorite elementary school teacher — or perhaps your own favorite secretary — might be there. If so, consider taking a moment to send them a note of thanks.

http://www.madison.k12.wi.us/today/880.htm

As the 2007-2008 school year winds down, it is the season for saying “thank you.” “Thank you” to all of the teachers and other District staff to whom we feel genuinely and deeply grateful. Does your school host a “teacher appreciation” event? If so, make sure your family participates. Or consider making a contribution to your school’s PTO — especially if there is a special fund for classroom teacher support — or one to your own teacher’s classroom supply fund. (We all know teachers purchase classroom supplies with their own money.) Or just take the time to write a note of thanks, perhaps encouraging your child to do the same. We have found that it feels good to end the year on a note of gratitude.
Whatever else I may say about the Madison school district and particular MMSD administrators, I also think we are blessed to have some absolutely incredible teachers in our schools. Our hats are off to each and every one of them.

“Schools should not rely on only WKCE data to gauge progress of individual students or to determine effectiveness of programs or curriculum”

Peter Sobol on the 2007 Wisconsin DPI State test results (WKCE):

The results for the WKCE test administered in November 2007 were finally released on May 30th. That is more than six months after the test was given. Worse, the data files containing the detailed results that can be used for proper statistical analysis of the results are STILL not available for download. Assessments are information that degrades over time. The fact that it takes six months to get the data out (whatever its other shortcomings) cheats the taxpayers of the full value of their investment.
At the very least the WI DPI should be embarrassed by the fact it takes this long to release the test results. Personally I find it outrageous. I had an email exchange with DPI officials concerning this long delay and the loss of value, this is an excerpt from part of that response (italics mine):

… The WKCE is a large-scale assessment designed to provide a snapshot of how well a district or school is doing at helping all students reach proficiency on state standards, with a focus on school and district-level accountability. A large-scale, summative assessment such as the WKCE is not designed to provide diagnostic information about individual students. Those assessments are best done at the local level, where immediate results can be obtained. Schools should not rely on only WKCE data to gauge progress of individual students or to determine effectiveness of programs or curriculum.

Does anyone else find the fact that the state issues WKCE results to individual students surprising given the above statement?

The Madison School District, together with the Wisconsin Center for Education Research is using local WKCE results for “Value Added Assessment“.
Much more on the WKCE here.
Minnesota recently administered their first online science test.

Accelerated Math Adds Up To a Division Over Merits

Daniel de Vise:

Next fall, 26 of the sharpest fifth-grade minds at Potomac Elementary School will study seventh-grade math. The rest of the fifth grade will learn sixth-grade math. Fifth-grade math will be left to the third- and fourth-graders.
Public schools nationwide are working to increase the number of students who study Algebra I, the traditional first-year high school math course, in eighth grade. Many Washington area schools have gone further, pushing large numbers of students two or three years ahead of the grade-level curriculum.
Math study in Montgomery County has evolved from one or two academic paths to many. Acceleration often begins in kindergarten. In a county known for demanding parents, the math push has generated an unexpected backlash. Many parents say children are pushed too far, too fast.
Sixty Montgomery math teachers complained, in a November forum, that students were being led into math classes beyond their abilities.

Related links:

Property taxes jump 3.8%, most in 3 years

Steven Walters:

The property tax bill on the typical Wisconsin home rose 3.8% last year – the biggest increase in three years, officials said Monday.
But fall levy limits on local governments, more state aid and slowing home values should prevent another boost like that this December, they said.
The Legislative Fiscal Bureau told legislators that property taxes on the median-valued home, which was assessed at $170,305 last year, totaled $2,838 – a $105 increase over the previous year. In each of the previous two years, the increase was less than 1%.
The $105 increase was up by about $10 from what lawmakers and Gov. Jim Doyle expected in October when they adopted the current state budget.
But the 3.8% increase was more than the inflation rate last year, which the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated at 2.8%.
State Budget Director Dave Schmiedicke said he expects the owner of a typical Wisconsin home to open a December tax bill that will go up less than 1%, which he called “a very small increase.”

Related Links:

  • Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance:

    Compared to the prior year (fiscal 2005), Wisconsin taxes were up slightly, from 12.1% to 12.3% of income, but the 50-state rank fell from eighth to 11th. The state’s tax burden was 5.5% above the U.S. average (11.6%). Since the late 1950s (see diagram, over), the Badger State’s tax burden and rankings have ranged from lows of 9.7% (1958) and 18th (1960) to highs of 15.8% (1973) and first (1964).

  • Wisconsin Legislative Fiscal Bureau Memorandum – 32K PDF. TJ Mertz comments on the tax increase.
  • Channel3000:

    Taxes paid to schools are by far the largest chunk of a homeowner’s tax bill. They increased 7.4 percent this year.
    The next two largest parts of a tax bill also went up: Municipal tax levies increased 5 percent, and county levies grew 4.5 percent.

  • K-12 Tax & Spending Climate
  • New York Governor proposes 4% cap on annual school property tax increases.

Their 3 R’s include running

Amy Hetzner:

Midday recess at Riverside Elementary School had reached a cacophonic pitch Monday, with students tossing assorted balls through the air, when a class of kindergartners added to the mix by bolting around the play area.
Far from scolding the children, their teachers encouraged the activity.
What happens on this vast plot of gravel, the thinking goes, can be as important as what goes on inside the classroom.
“When you’re talking about education, you have to look at the whole child,” Riverside counselor Kara Baker said, “because if they’re not well, they’re not going to learn.”
That focus on wellness has won the school recognition over the past two years, as a Governor’s School Health Award silver-level winner.
Riverside was the only Waukesha County school to receive the award in 2008. James Fenimore Cooper School in Milwaukee was a gold award winner.

Oxford just gave state education an F

Jenny McCartney:

Oxford wants £1.25 billion. That is the target of the biggest fundraising drive in the university’s history, announced last week.
This sum would, the university said, enable it to “sustain and enhance” its reputation and provide “security in a world of uncertain state funding and growing global competition
It didn’t mention directly what is almost certainly one of its biggest ambitions: to use the loot to slip away from the ever-tightening squeeze of the Government.
Our Government, like some town hall functionary of limited comprehension but relentless ambition, has long regarded the clever clogs at Oxford with the deepest suspicion. It has rightly suspected that, with Oxford’s fabled reputation for independent thinking, the university might not be suitably subservient to the New Labour mania for centrally imposed targets.

Students find the ’08 presidential race is not politics as usual

Greg Toppo:

It was the first week of February, and Jesse Sharkey’s students were doing the math.
They were not amused.
Most of his juniors and seniors at Chicago’s Senn High School are Barack Obama supporters — Obama is from Chicago, after all. So they wanted to know why Obama, who had won 14 of 22 states on Super Tuesday, had barely scored more delegates than Hillary Clinton.
(Answer: Democrats award delegates based on percentage of votes received.)
And why was he still behind in the total count? And what’s a superdelegate anyway?

Community College Transfer Mess

Jay Matthews:

Like many community college students, Josie Showers saw her classes at Jefferson Community and Technical College in Louisville as the first step toward a four-year degree. She was among the nearly half of American students who start college in two-year community schools. They are told if they work hard, their state’s four-year colleges will be happy to accept them as transfers and cheer them on to graduation. But Showers, like many others, discovered those four-year schools are not as helpful as she had been led to believe.
After she transferred to the University of Louisville as a 27-year-old political science major, she was told she could not get her bachelor’s degree until she had taken the university’s pre-algebra class. That made no sense to her. She had already taken an algebra course, learning concepts more advanced than pre-algebra, at her community college. Sorry, she was told. Rules are rules. That kind of red tape cost her an extra semester and $4,000 before she could graduate.

Education for Peace

H.D.S Greenway:

When it was becoming clear that the tide of World War II was turning, after Battle of Midway, after Battle of Stalingrad, when Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps was on the run, an unknown, first-term congressman introduced a resolution that would help shape the post-war world.
The freshman congressman was J. William Fulbright, Democrat of Arkansas. His resolution was only one sentence, as “plain as an old hat,” said Life magazine at the time: “Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring) that the Congress hereby expresses itself as favoring the creation of appropriate international machinery with power adequate to establish and to maintain a just and lasting peace among the nations of the world, and as favoring participation by the United States therein.”
In June of 1943, an isolationist Republican from Ohio, John Vorys, rose to voice his approval, and the resolution was passed. Vorys’s conversion marked the beginning of the United States’s bipartisan, multilateralist foreign policy that would lead to the forming of the United Nations, reversing America’s decision after World War I not to join the League of Nations.
Fulbright, a former Rhodes Scholar and University of Arkansas president, was elected to the Senate the following year. He would go on to become the only senator to vote against the appropriation for Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Un-American Activities Committee, and, afterward, as the longest serving chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which so ably illuminated the absurdities of the Vietnam War.
Flowing from his early internationalist resolution came the creation of the Fulbright Scholar Program, signed into law by Harry Truman in 1946. It promoted educational exchanges between foreign students and Americans to facilitate “mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries of the world.” It is a program I have been involved with over the years.

Fulbright Scholars website.

Saudi Prince Sultan Thanks Education Ministry for Winning WTO Education Tourism Award

Mohammed Rasooldeen:

“This is a prestigious award we have received for the Education Scholastic Tourism Program (Smile) which we launched in 2005 in cooperation with the Ministry of Education,” Prince Sultan ibn Salman, secretary general of the Supreme Commission For Tourism (SCT), told newsmen at a packed press conference at the SCT headquarters held here yesterday to celebrate the award which was given in in Madrid on Wednesday.
The prince formally presented the award to Education Minister Dr. Abdullah Saleh Al-Obeid, whose ministry was instrumental in implementing the program for 150,000 students during the past three years.
Thanking the ministry of education for its unstinted cooperation, the prince recalled that during the past two years, the program — Smile — has covered 150,000 students and 1,800 teachers in 2,700 schools in 42 education department offices. “We want to extend this proven program to another 900,000 students — both boys and girls — in the intermediate and high schools,” Prince Sultan added.

Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Education.

Art Rainwater: the great communicator

Capital Times Editorial:

Superintendent Art Rainwater attended his last Madison School Board meeting Monday night, and everything seemed so collegial and functional that it was easy to imagine it had always been this way.
But, of course, it was not.
Art Rainwater took over a school district that was in crisis.
When he succeeded former Superintendent Cheryl Wilhoyte a decade ago, the administration was at odds with much of the School Board, the community and, most seriously, with unions representing teachers and other school employees.
Much of the trouble had to do with Wilhoyte’s unwillingness — perhaps inability — to communicate in a straight-forward manner.
Rainwater changed things immediately.
He was frank and accessible, never spoke in the arcane jargon of education bureaucrats and set up a regular schedule of meetings with board members, community leaders and Madison Teachers Inc. executive director John Matthews.

Related: MMSD Today feature on Art Rainwater. Notes and links on Madison’s incoming Superintendent, Dan Nerad
Much more on retiring Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater.
Tamira Madsen covers Art’s last school board meeting.
Time Flies by Art Rainwater.
The Madison School District’s budget was $200,311,280 (24,710 enrollment) in 1994 and is $367,806,712 for the 2008/2009 (24,268 enrollment) school year.

Ruling: Madison district must reinstate athletic directors

Andy Hall:


The Madison School District must reinstate four high school athletic directors and “make them whole for any financial loss, ” according to an arbitrator ‘s ruling made public Monday.
Arbitrator Milo Flaten ruled the district violated its contract with Madison Teachers Inc. a year ago when it replaced the four athletic directors — who were union members — with two managers hired from other school districts.
In the decision, dated Friday and released by MTI on Monday, Flaten wrote that under its existing contract with MTI, the district promised that “athletic directors in the four schools would be represented by the union and that they would be members of the bargaining unit. No amount of reassignment of duties or creation of superficial boundaries can change that.”
MTI Executive Director John Matthews on Monday estimated the decision could cost the district more than $230,000.
Of that amount, each of the four former athletic directors would receive about $8,000 apiece — the extra compensation the four, who still work for the district, would have received this school year as athletic directors.

Education in Sweden and Finland
Competition—and ignoring the 1970s—breeds success

The Economist:

THE best schools in the world, it is generally agreed, are in Finland. In the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) studies, which compare 15-year-olds’ reading, mathematics and science abilities in more than 50 countries, it routinely comes top. So politicians, academics, think-tankers and teachers from all over the world visit Finnish schools in the hope of discovering the magic ingredient. Journalists come too, and now it’s my turn.
And since I’m coming this far north, I want to take in Sweden too. That social-democratic paradise has carried out school reforms that make free-market ideologues the world over weak at the knees. In the 1990s it opened its state-education system to private competition, allowing new schools to receive the same amount for each pupil as the state would have spent on that child.
Sweden is my first stop. My week starts with post-breakfast coffee with Widar Andersson, an ex-chairman of Sweden’s Independent Schools Association. When the independent schools reforms were first mooted in 1991, he was a member of parliament for the Social Democrats, in one of their rare spells in opposition. “I think I was the only Social Democrat in favour of the reforms,” he tells me.
In 1994, when they came into force, he and two state-school teachers opened one of the very first independent schools. It was not the first time he took on the state: years earlier he and a few other social workers had set up a private company trying innovative ways to treat drug addicts. “I learned there must be other ways to do things than those the state has decided are right, especially in a country like Sweden where the state is so large,” he says.

Changing Perceptions of Private Religious Schools: Public Money and Public Trust in the Education of Children

William Bassett:

Private religious schools were originally intended to provide a sound secular education to children in their formative years, together with religious instruction and the experience of the life and culture of their faiths. In recent decades, however, as ongoing social and economic challenges have led to the deterioration of the public school system, private schools have been looked to as possible alternatives for educating public school children through such programs as tax-funded school vouchers.
But can these institutions be trusted to provide quality education without bias? In the last half century, Supreme Court opinions discussing public education and the Establishment clause have reflected a general distrust of parochial school systems. Public perception of religious schools has also changed little. The author argues, however, that private religious schools – in particular Catholic schools – have evolved to become more professional, more ecumenical, and more financially transparent, and thus are well positioned to offer viable alternatives to provide quality educational opportunities to public school children. But in order for these programs, such as school vouchers, to succeed, the public must be assured that religious schools will not divert taxpayer dollars into self-interested sectarian purposes.