“Whoppers in Arne Duncan’s Education Week Essay”

Parents United for Responsible Education:

Considering the billion of dollars and millions of children’s lives that are at stake, Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s claims about his record in Chicago merit special scrutiny. Mr. Duncan has made it clear that he intends to tie federal education funds to requirements that districts across the nation rapidly replicate the “Chicago model.”
Advocates in Chicago have a special vantage point for this effort. We have been comparing Mr. Duncan’s rhetoric with reality for several years, and finding significant factual errors and misstatements. For these inaccurate statements to be repeated on the national stage and in service to a potential orgy of spending on programs that have a questionable track record of success puts our children’s educational future at serious risk. Chicagoans must speak out and share what we know.
For example, we have learned that independent research on the Duncan reforms (known collectively as Renaissance 2010) by the Rand Corporation (2008) and SRI International (2009) finds that his new schools perform only “on par” with traditional neighborhood schools. We’ve also found that the new schools serve fewer low-income, special education, and limited-English proficient students.
In other words, Renaissance 2010 has yet to yield academic improvement, even with less-challenging students. Yet Mr. Duncan decries “school officials (who) have been content with changes that produce nominal progress.”

Wisconsin State budget deal bought with earmarks, Including $500,000 for Madison’s Proposed 4K Program

Steven Walters:

Facing a record deficit that forced them to raise taxes and fees by $2.1 billion to balance the budget, Assembly Democrats added millions for projects they can brag about back home – a $500,000 upgrade for an opera house; $50,000 for a shooting range; and $46,000 for a town’s recycling bins.
As they erased a $6.6 billion, two-year deficit, Assembly Democrats added $36.7 million in regional favors, according to a Legislative Fiscal Bureau summary.
Five of the projects – including the $500,000 for the Oshkosh Opera House, $500,000 for an Aldo Leopold Climate Change Classroom and Laboratory, and $125,000 for the Phillips Library in Eau Claire – have not been recommended by the state Building Commission, which is supposed to approve construction and maintenance spending.
The shooting range is in Eau Claire, and the recycling bins are for the Town of Wrightstown.
Some of the so-called earmarks don’t cost money, but get around limits on the number of liquor licenses in communities. The Assembly-passed budget would award a new liquor license in the Madison suburb of Monona, for example, and hand out three more liquor licenses in St. Francis.
Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause in Wisconsin, said Assembly Democrats behaved just like Assembly Republicans, who controlled that half of the Legislature for a 14-year period that ended in January.

Reading skills soar in intensive, expensive MPS program

Alan Borsuk:

Let us end the school year with congratulations to Yolimar Maldonado, Lizbeth Fernandez and Nikki Hill, all finishing their sophomore year at Milwaukee Hamilton High School.
To Kenyon Turner, a freshman who went to Bay View and then Community High School; Myha Truss, an eighth-grader at Roosevelt Middle School of the Arts; and Tyrece Toliver, a seventh-grader at the Milwaukee Education Center. And to dozens of other students in Milwaukee Public Schools, of whom this can be said:
They made strong progress this year in improving their reading, jumping ahead more than a grade, and, in some cases, several grades.
It wasn’t easy, either for them or for their teachers.
And it wasn’t cheap – MPS spent $3.2 million for 38 teachers to work in the reading improvement program this year, and that alone comes to more than $1,500 per student.
You could have a very substantial conversation about why they each were far behind grade level in reading going into the school year. None is a special education student. And almost all of them were still behind grade level at the end of the year, even with all the progress they made.
Nonetheless, applaud their success.
A program called Read 180 was the vehicle the students rode to better reading. It offers a strongly structured program, sessions on each student’s level doing computer-led exercises in spelling and vocabulary, and strong, sometimes one-on-one involvement with a teacher.

It would be interest to compare Read 180’s costs with another program: Reading Recovery.

Success at Small Schools Has a Price, a Report Says

Javier Hernandez:

Replacing large, poor-performing high schools with smaller schools in New York City has led to lower attendance and graduation rates at other large high schools, which have struggled to accommodate influxes of high-needs students, according to a report to be released on Wednesday.
Small schools, which cap enrollment at several hundred students and boast themes like environmental science and the performing arts, have emerged as a hallmark of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s education reform efforts. Over the past seven years, the city has closed more than two dozen large comprehensive high schools, which typically enroll thousands of students, and replaced them with smaller schools, which are supposed to foster more intimate relationships and higher student achievement.
The report, conducted by researchers at the New School’s Center for New York City Affairs, does not dispute the success of small schools in improving graduation rates of needy students. But it argues that the city should do more to support comprehensive high schools, which have been saddled with large numbers of the high-needs students who do not enroll at small schools.
The 18-month study examined 34 large high schools and found that 14 of them had decreases in attendance and graduation rates from 2003 to 2008, when the number of small schools in the city multiplied.

Seattle Public Schools Strategic Plan

Marie Goodloe-Johnson (Superintendent of Seattle Schools):

AT Seattle Public Schools, our primary goal is to provide an education that prepares each student to graduate from high school ready for college, careers and life.
Elliot Ransom, a National Merit scholar from Ballard High School, plans to study engineering; Kenny Setiao dropped out of Cleveland High School, but returned to receive a scholarship to South Seattle Community College; and Nicole Davis won the prestigious National Merit Scholarship. The graduation of these and thousands of other students from Seattle Public Schools is a critical measure of our success as educators.
If college-ready graduation for all students is the goal, how do we get there? First, we have to admit that what we have been doing is not working for all students. Today, almost four in 10 students in Seattle don’t graduate on time. In today’s world, the benefits of postsecondary education have never been greater.
Second, we must recognize that getting ready for college starts long before students enter ninth grade. When students meet critical milestones — entering kindergarten ready to learn, reading at grade level in third grade, taking algebra in eighth grade, and passing the WASL in 10th grade — they are more likely to make it to graduation day. Our strategic plan [636K PDF], called Excellence for All, is our guide to reach this goal.

The Madison School District’s Strategic Plan, By the Numbers

Via a kind reader’s email:

Culturally Relevant/Cultural Relevance 40
Standards 24
Content 21
Measure (including measurement) 28
DPI 2
TAG 17
Special Education 8
ELL 2 (it comes up 45 times, but the other 43 were things like ZELLmer)
inclusion 0
differentiation 0
science 2
mathematics 0
literacy 4
reading 7 (of these, three were in the appendix with the existing ‘plan’)
African American 7
Hmong 1 (and not in any of the action plans)
Latino or Latina 0
Hispanic 0
Spanish speaking or Spanish speakers 0
Anyone see a problem here?????

The free Adobe Reader includes a text search field. Simply open the proposed document (773K PDF) and start searching.
The Proposed Strategic Plan, along with some comments, can be viewed here.
Interested readers might have a look at this Fall, 2005 Forum on Poverty organized by Rafael Gomez (audio/video). Former Madison School Board member Ray Allen participated. Ray mentioned that his daughter was repeatedly offered free breakfasts, even though she was fed at home prior to being dropped off at school. The event is worth checking out.
I had an opportunity to have lunch with Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad last summer. Prior to that meeting, I asked a number of teachers and principals what I should pass along. One of the comments I received is particularly relevant to Madison’s proposed Strategic Plan:

  1. Curriculum: greater rigor
  2. Discipline: a higher bar, much higher bar, consistent expectations district wide, a willingness to wrestle with the negative impact of poverty on the habits of mind of our students and favor pragmatic over ideological solutions
  3. Teacher inservice: at present these are insultingly infantile
  4. Leadership: attract smart principals that are more entrepreneurial and less bureaucratic, mindful of the superintendent’s “inner circle” and their closeness to or distance from the front lines (the classrooms)

I know these are general, but they are each so glaringly needy of our attention and problem solving efforts.

Notes and links on Madison’s Strategic Planning Process.

Notes and Links on Last Week’s Southwest Madison Student Murder

David Blaska mentions that Madison’s Mayor is holding a meeting this morning. The meeting includes Madison School District Superintendent Dan Nerad:

Several landlords have invited the mayor to take up residence on our troubled streets so that he can experience firsthand what many of our neighbors must put up with in their daily lives. Some of them extended the invitation/challenge even before — hours before — the murder. [Let the Mayor come to Meadowood.]
In the meantime, Mayor Dave Cieslewicz has made good on his promise to convene a meeting to deal with the “Lord of the Flies” chaos in certain sections of southwest Madison.
The mayor’s meeting will be held Wednesday morning — exactly one week after Madison woke up to the news that a 17-year-old boy had been shot to death at Leland and Balsam Roads the previous evening, June 9, on the troubled southwest side. Shortly afterward, three 16-year-olds boys were apprehended and charged in connection with his murder — two of them as adults for first degree intentional homicide.
Some of us, including Ald. Pham-Remmele, saw the trouble coming long agI blogged on May 20, quoting a neighbor, “Unless the police are able to get a handle on the roaming gangs, this summer is going to be bloody.” [Going to be a long, hot summer]

A previous post mentioned this:

Police officer Amos said the principal of Toki Middle School will not permit him to arrest children in the school, even though some of them are chronic drug users.
“These people know how to work the system,” said another. Yes, they know their rights but not their responsibilities.

Nearly four years ago, Rafael Gomez organized a Gangs & School Violence forum. The conversation, which included local high school principals, police personnel and Luis Yudice, among others, is worth revisiting.
Related: Police calls near local high schools 1996-2006 and more recent police calls via a map.

Duncan: Superintendents Need To Think Differently About Education Investments

Geoffrey Fletcher:

Are funds for education being spent wisely? Not according to United States Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who, in a broad-based interview with THE Journal June 12, stressed the importance of thinking differently about how we invest resources. “What [superintendents] do with the new money misses the point. What we really want to do is have folks rethink existing resources as well. And what I would argue in lots of places is that existing resources are not being spent as wisely as they could,” he told THE Journal at a meeting held at the U.S. Department of Education’s offices.
And this goes for technology. As “unprecedented money is being distributed to education,” the Department has stressed wise investments that acknowledge the one-time nature of funds under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA). Guidelines from the Department for all these funds point out the “funding cliff,” and note, “These funds should be invested in ways that do not result in unsustainable continuing commitments after the funding expires.”

In Urban Classrooms, the Least Experienced Teach the Neediest Kids

MaryEllen McGuire:

Imagine for a moment that you are driving your child to the hospital. She has a high fever and is suffering from severe abdominal pain. It’s unclear what’s wrong but she is in definite need of medical attention.
Now imagine that the only doctor on call is a recently graduated medical student. It’s her first day on the job and there is no experienced physician or surgeon available for consultation. Are you satisfied with this level of care for your child? I wouldn’t be. I’d want to benefit from the knowledge of a more experienced physician. Wouldn’t you?
Unfortunately, a similar scenario is playing out in America’s urban classrooms with shocking regularity. Teachers with the least experience are educating the most disadvantaged students in the highest poverty, most challenging schools. Low-income kids are being “triaged” not by experienced teachers, but by those with fewer than three years of teaching to go on.
Does it matter? Absolutely. According to the research, teacher experience is at least a partial predictor of success in the classroom and, at present, one of the only approximations for teacher quality widely available. Experienced teachers tend to have better classroom management skills and a stronger command of curricular materials. Novice teachers on the other hand struggle during their initial years in any classroom.

What Happens to School Choice if People Aren’t Rational and Choose Bad Schools?

Daniel Willingham:

The logic of school choice seems obvious. If parents selected their children’s schools, they would not choose bad ones, so bad schools would not be able to survive. Schools would have to improve or close, just as a store that offers poor service will lose business to a store that offers better service.
Here’s my problem with that logic: I think it’s highly likely that many parents will choose bad schools.
People often make irrational decisions. The decisions most often studied by psychologists over the last 40 years are financial, but in the last 20 years research has explored decisions made about sex, medicine, and a great many other subjects (see Dan Ariely’s wonderful book, Predictably Irrational, for an account.)
Financial decisions offer a useful analogy because the success or failure of the decision seems straightforward: you make money or you don’t; similarly, it would seem, schools teach kids or they don’t.

U.S. to Spend Up to $350 Million For Uniform Tests in Reading, Math

AP:

The federal government will spend up to $350 million to help states developing national standards for reading and math, Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced Sunday.
In the current patchwork of benchmarks across the nation, students and schools considered failing in one state might get passing grades in another. The Obama administration is urging states to replace their standards for student achievement with a common set.
Every state except Alaska, South Carolina, Missouri and Texas has signed on to the concept, but getting them to adopt whatever emerges as the national benchmark will be politically difficult.

Eastern Michigan University Newest Safety Tool is Crime Mapping

USNewswire:

One of the most important tools in crime prevention and safety is getting an accurate and timely picture of what is going on.
Eastern Michigan University and the City of Ypsilanti are taking that picture one step further.
By partnering with EMU’s Institute for Geospatial Research, EMU’s Department of Public Safety and the Ypsilanti Police Department have created a mapping/tracking system for area crime.
“We saw an opportunity to use EMU resources to help the campus and the community by providing timely, accurate information that enhances the safety of our campus,” said Sue Martin, president of EMU.
“This is part of our commitment to having a transparent police agency,” said Greg O’Dell, executive director of public safety at EMU. “With this addition to our Web site, people have total access to a lot of information.”
“We want to increase the awareness of what’s going on out there. If we increase awareness, people will have a better understanding of what is going on and take appropriate action,” said O’Dell.
The crime mapping application is located on the DPS Web site (http://geodata.acad.emich.edu/Crime/Main.htm) and provides users with a visual representation of where crime is occurring by adding markers to a map of the campus and the city. The application uses the Google mapping Web interface to plot the points where crimes occur.
“DPS posts the data daily to its Web site and the application looks at that data and maps it,” said Mike Dueweke, manager of EMU’s Institute for Geospatial Research.

New era of gene-based ‘personalized medicine’ dawning

Robert Boyd:

Now, many thousands more people are contributing DNA samples for a wide array of follow-on studies designed to turn the project’s findings to practical use in health care, genetics and biological research.
Researchers and doctors have opened a new era of “personalized medicine” that seeks to tailor therapies to patients based on their unique genetic makeups and medical histories.
According to the National Cancer Institute, the days are passing when most cancer tumors were thought to be essentially the same and patients got the same drugs.
“We’re not very good at selecting therapies for individual patients,” Dr. Rick Hockett, the chief medical officer of Affymetrix, a genetics firm in Santa Clara, Calif., told a conference on personalized medicine this month in Washington. “Targeted therapy,” he said, can “improve the benefit-risk ratio for patients.”
For example, Hockett said that heart patients who took the popular anti-clotting drug Plavix had a greatly increased risk of serious problems, including death, if they had two tiny mutations in their genes.

Report: Missouri charter school students outperform peers

Mara Rose Williams:

Missouri charter school students, on average, do better in reading and math than students in their peer traditional public schools, according to a national study released today.
The report done by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University does not mention specific schools in Kansas City or St. Louis — the only two places in the state allowed by law to operate charters.
The report’s authors say they found great variation in academic achievement among each state’s charters.
“An important part of the story is the variations,” said Margaret Raymond, director of the Center and lead author of the report.

Mayoral Control and the New York City Schools

NY Times Editorial:

The New York State Assembly is expected to pass a bill this week that would extend, and improve, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s direct control of New York City’s school system. The legislation extends the powers that have allowed Mr. Bloomberg to bring order to a school system that was once known mainly for patronage and gridlock. It also allows for greater transparency and more input from parents and communities.
It would preserve the mayor’s right to appoint a majority of the members of the board that advises him on school matters. But it also calls for several changes that would make that board slightly more independent and give it more of a voice in the policy-making process.
Mr. Bloomberg, for example, would be required to appoint parents to at least two of the eight seats that he controls on the 13-member board. Currently, the school system’s chancellor, who serves at the mayor’s pleasure, leads the board. The board would instead elect its own chairman. The board also would have broader powers and responsibilities, including greater authority over some procurement contracts. It would be required to hold well-publicized meetings at least once a month. In another step for accountability, the bill gives the city comptroller and the city’s Independent Budget Office the authority to examine scores, dropout rates and other data.

New Millennium Schools: Delivering Six-Figure Teacher Salaries in Return for Outstanding Student Learning Gains

Matthew Ladner:

Despite the fact that American students enjoy higher average family incomes and per-pupil funding, they consistently rank near the bottom in international examinations of high school achievement. Many researchers point to the United States’ poor practices of recruiting, training, compensating, and retaining teachers. The highest-achieving countries tend to recruit their teachers from the top 5 percent of university graduates; however, on average, American K-12 schools recruit from the bottom third.
A growing body of research in the United States demonstrates that teacher quality makes a profound difference in student learning. Judging schools on a value-added basis, by measuring academic growth over time, reveals a profound need to attract high-quality teachers into American classrooms in large numbers. Students learning from three highly effective instructors in three successive grades learn 50 percent more than students who have three consecutive ineffective instructors. These results are consistent across subjects and occur after controlling for student factors. Teacher quality is 10 to 20 times more important than variation in average class sizes, within the observable range. Unfortunately, though, poor human resource practices lead high-quality teachers to cluster in leafy suburbs, far from the children most in need.

Charter School Performance in 16 States

Stanford Center for Research on Education Outcomes:

As charter schools play an increasingly central role in education reform agendas across the United States, it becomes more important to have current and comprehensible analysis about how well they do educating their students. Thanks to progress in student data systems and regular student achievement testing, it is possible to examine student learning in charter schools and compare it to the experience the students would have had in the traditional public schools (TPS) they would otherwise have attended. This report presents a longitudinal student‐level analysis of charter school impacts on more than 70 percent of the students in charter schools in the United States. The scope of the study makes it the first national assessment of charter school impacts.
Charter schools are permitted to select their focus, environment and operations and wide
diversity exists across the sector. This study provides an overview that aggregates charter schools in different ways to examine different facets of their impact on student academic growth. The group portrait shows wide variation in performance. The study reveals that a decent fraction of charter schools, 17 percent, provide superior education opportunities for their students. Nearly half of the charter schools nationwide have results that are no different from the local public school options and over a third, 37 percent, deliver learning results that are significantly worse than their student would have realized had they remained in traditional public schools.
These findings underlie the parallel findings of significant state‐by‐state differences in charter school performance and in the national aggregate performance of charter schools. The policy challenge is how to deal constructively with varying

Surprising Source of Grade Inflation

Doug Lederman:

The list of complaints about the statewide standardized exams that most states have adopted as high school accountability measures is long: professors teach to the test, the standards are pegged to the lowest common denominator, etc. But a new study suggests that a new one might be added in some states: contributing to grade inflation for college-bound students who do well on the tests.
And that finding, if borne out, could complicate the already significant problems of college admissions officers trying to decide among many seemingly highly qualified candidates.
The working paper, which was written by George Mason University’s Patrick D. Marquardt and published on the Social Science Research Network, examines the impact that Virginia’s Standards of Learning — and particularly changes that the state made to encourage high school students to take the test seriously — had on the average high school grade point average of students who attended Virginia’s public colleges.
Virginia implemented its statewide high school test in 1998, but after many schools’ students fared poorly on the high-stakes exam in its first years, the state, hoping to encourage more students to take it seriously, required all students to pass a certain number of SOL exams to graduate. Marquardt’s paper, though, focuses on changes that school districts quietly made to encourage student participation, often involving grade-based incentives. Some, Marquardt says; among the most extreme, gave students who passed an exam an uptick (from B to B+, say), while others let students use the SOL in a particular subject as their final exam, earning an A if they passed it.

Letters: Better Schools? Here are Some Ideas

Letters regarding Five Ways to Fix America’s Schools:

Harold O. Levy suggested five disparate ways to improve the educational system in America’s schools. Only one of his suggestions, however, even remotely touched on the most fundamental aspect of this daunting challenge: improving our youngest students’ reading skills as a means of instilling self-confidence and an interest in learning.
This is something that can be addressed now, without the major financing and structural changes needed to truly reform the system.

How Facebook Is Affecting School Reunions

Gilbert Cruz:

Who got fat, who got hot, and is that old crush of mine still single? Whatever happened to that weird kid with the hair? Wait, am I the one that got fat?
Such are the essential questions at the core of every high school and college reunion. For decades, the routine has remained the same: a bunch of old classmates get together and catch up, settle (or renew) grievances, and swap glory-days stories. Yet the ability to locate former classmates through Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and, well, the Internet itself, has alumni organizations and other such groups wondering if the sun is setting on the traditionally organized reunion. (TIME Reports: Five Facebook No-Nos For Divorcing Couples)
Take Kim Brinegar, who in 1998 helped organize the 10-year reunion for her class at Maryland’s Arundel High School. “Back then, the Internet wasn’t really that reliable for finding people,” she says. “I had to rely on word of mouth, advertising in the paper, and sending things to people’s parents.” For the 20-year reunion, however, she had a new tool: Facebook. Through the site, Brinegar was able to get in touch with tons of people she couldn’t track down last time around, including an exchange student from Italy who flew across the Atlantic for the reunion last November. (See TIME’s top 10 social networking apps.)
Rather than turn people off from wanting to attend (“Well, smokin’ hot Sally looks just awful now — no need for me to go”), Facebook only increased the excitement for the 20th reunion at Massachusetts’ Sharon High School, says Holly Goshin, who helped plan the event. “It’s enticing, it’s like a little preview, seeing everyone’s life online. And — whether you’re happy that someone is not doing as well as you or you’re happy that they look amazing — you get to see it all in person. Then you can move on with your life.”

‘Voucher’ rider stirs fight over education

Niki Kelly:

A scholarship tax credit provision inserted into Gov. Mitch Daniels’ budget proposal has ignited a philosophic debate about public and private education in Indiana.
And some opponents say the timing of the move is inconvenient, as lawmakers are trying to pass a new state budget in a special legislative session amid plummeting state tax collections.
Opponents call the provision a back door to vouchers, but supporters say it simply provides an opportunity for low-income students struggling in traditional schools to attend a private school.
“It’s scholarship money. Call it vouchers. Call it what you want,” said Sen. Marlin Stutzman, R-Howe. “I’d call it an opportunity for a child.”
During the regular season, Stutzman was the co-author of a bill authorizing the program. Even though it passed the Republican-controlled Senate on several occasions, the Democratic-led House declined to move it forward.
The idea surfaced again in late budget negotiations but ultimately was left out of a compromise between the House and Senate.

Picture is unclear on arts instruction in schools

Greg Toppo:

Gather up a group of eighth-graders, pop in a CD of George Gershwin’s seminal Rhapsody in Blue and turn up the volume. Then ask: In those first few seconds, what keening, soaring, note-bending instrument do you hear?
When the federal government put this question to thousands of eighth-graders in 1997, only about half knew it was a clarinet. When they tried again last year, the results were the same.
New data out today from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, may make America’s arts instructors kind of blue: In the past decade or so, middle-schoolers have made little progress in how much they know about music and visual arts.

Teachers asked to bring green mapmaking to schools

Desy Nurhayati:

High school teachers in Greater Jakarta participating in an environmental workshop Saturday, were encouraged to bring the Green Map system to their students, to raise their environmental awareness.
In one of the workshops, volunteers from the Green Map Indonesia community shared their experience of mapmaking toward a sustainable community development with teachers.
The teachers were expected to be able to deliver the system to their students and start mapping out their green surroundings, volunteer Elanto Wijoyono said during the session.
“Students can start by mapping out their schools before expanding to other areas.”
“They can also explore many interesting things they find during the mapping activities,” he said, adding the system could be a more enjoyable approach to learning, combined with other subjects in the curriculum.
Creating Green Maps would make students more responsive to preserving the environment, said Marco Kusumawijaya, another Green Map volunteer.

Milwaukee makes gain, wants more, in school voucher funding

Alan Borsuk:

Milwaukee officials got a hit when they went to bat for a better deal for city taxpayers on how the private school voucher program is paid for, but they definitely didn’t hit a home run.
That’s one way to summarize state budget deliberations when it comes to fixing the so-called voucher funding flaw.
Decisions by the state Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee endorsed last week by the Assembly, would give the city a better deal when it comes to paying for the program, which is costing the state and city about $130 million this year for about 20,000 students to go to about 120 private schools.
But the outcome will not make a sharp difference in the forecast for property taxes to pay for schools for next year – which is to say, there remains a definite possibility that the Milwaukee School Board will wrestle with the prospect of a double-digit increase in the tax levy this fall.
The budget now goes to the Senate, which is expected to vote this week.
Jennifer Gonda, senior legislative fiscal manager for the city, estimated that provisions in the new state budget would save a typical Milwaukee homeowner $20 next year and $38 the next year. That’s based on the average home assessment in the city, $127,500.

Rigid Athletic Tracking

The New York Times reports that the Stamford, Connecticut public schools may finally achieve the goal of eliminating academic tracking, putting students of mixed academic ability in the same classes at last. The Times reports that “this 15,000-student district just outside New York City…is among the last bastions of rigid educational tracking more than a decade after most school districts abandoned the practice.”
If that newspaper thinks Stamford has taken too long to get rid of academic tracks for K-12 students, how would they report on the complete dominance of athletic tracking in schools all over the country? Not only does such athletic tracking take place in all our schools, but there is, at present, no real movement to eliminate it, unbelievable as that may seem.
Athletes in our school sports programs are routinely tracked into groups of students with similar ability, presumably to make their success in various sports matches, games, and contests more likely. But so far no attention is paid to the damage to the self-esteem of those student athletes whose lack of ability and coordination doom them to the lower athletic tracks, and even, in many cases, may deprive them of membership on school teams altogether.
It is also an open secret that many of our school athletic teams ignore diversity entirely, and make no effort to be sure that, for example, Asians and Caucasians are included, in proportion to their numbers in the general population, in football, basketball, and track teams. Athletic ability and success are allowed to overwhelm other important measures, and this must be taken into account in any serious Athletic Untracking effort.
In Stamford, some parents are opposed to the elimination of academic tracking, and have threatened to enroll their children in private schools. This problem would no doubt also arise in any serious Athletic Untracking program which could be introduced. Parents who spend money on private coaches for their children would not stand by and see the playing time of their young athletes cut back or even lost by any program to make all school sports teams composed of mixed-ability athletes.
The New York Times reports that “Deborah Kasak, executive director of the National Forum to Accelerate Middle Grades Reform, said research is showing that all students benefit from mixed-ability classes.”
Perhaps it will be argued that all athletes benefit from mixed-ability teams as well, but many would predict not only plenty of losing seasons for any schools which eliminate Athletic Tracking programs, but also very poor scholarship prospects for the best athletes who are involved in them. Just as students who are capable of excellent academic work are often sacrificed to the dream of an academic (Woebegone) world in which all are equal, so student athletes will find their skills and performance severely degraded by any Athletic Untracking program.
Nevertheless, when educators are more committed to diversity and equality of outcomes in classrooms than they are in academic achievement, they have eliminated academic tracking and set up mixed-ability classrooms.
Surely athletic directors and coaches can be made to see the supreme importance of some new diversity and equity initiatives as well, and persuaded, at the risk of losing their jobs, to develop and provide non-tracked athletic programs for our mixed-ability student athletes. After all, winning games may be fun, but, in the long run, people can be led to realize that being politically correct is much more worthwhile than real achievement in any endeavor in our public schools. As the Dean of a major School of Education recently informed me: “The myth of individual greatness is a myth.” [sic] The time for the elimination of Athletic Tracking has now arrived!
15 June 2009
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review

No Longer Letting Scores Separate Pupils (No More Tracking)

Winnie Hu via a kind reader’s email:

Sixth graders at Cloonan Middle School here are assigned numbers based on their previous year’s standardized test scores — zeros indicate the highest performers, ones the middle, twos the lowest — that determine their academic classes for the next three years.


But this longstanding system for tracking children by academic ability for more effective teaching evolved into an uncomfortable caste system in which students were largely segregated by race and socioeconomic background, both inside and outside classrooms. Black and Hispanic students, for example, make up 46 percent of this year’s sixth grade, but are 78 percent of the twos and 7 percent of the zeros.



So in an unusual experiment, Cloonan mixed up its sixth-grade science and social studies classes last month, combining zeros and ones with twos. These mixed-ability classes have reported fewer behavior problems and better grades for struggling students, but have also drawn complaints of boredom from some high-performing students who say they are not learning as much.



The results illustrate the challenge facing this 15,000-student district just outside New York City, which is among the last bastions of rigid educational tracking more than a decade after most school districts abandoned the practice. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Stamford sorted students into as many as 15 different levels; the current system of three to five levels at each of four middle schools will be replaced this fall by a two-tiered model, in which the top quarter of sixth graders will be enrolled in honors classes, the rest in college-prep classes. (A fifth middle school is a magnet school and has no tracking.)

Two Years of Hard Lessons For D.C. Schools’ Agent of Change

Bill Turque:

The image of Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee on newsstands nationwide was causing an uproar among teachers, parents and other constituents. So D.C. Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray had to ask her, as she sat in his cavernous, wood-paneled office in December: “Michelle, why would you agree to be photographed with a broom on the cover of Time magazine?”
And he had a follow-up: “What does it get you, to constantly bash those you’re trying to get to help you?”
Rhee explained that most of the shoot for the Dec. 8 issue involved images of her with children. The idea for the broom, which she gripped while standing stern-faced in front of a blackboard, came up near the end, she said, according to Gray’s version of their meeting. She told Gray that it wasn’t her first choice for the cover but that the decision wasn’t hers. Gray wasn’t satisfied.
“Why did you let the picture be taken in the first place?”
In her quest to upend and transform the District’s long-broken school system, Rhee has acquired a sometimes-painful education of her own. The lessons, in many respects, tell the story of her tenure as her second school year draws to a close Monday: that money isn’t everything; that political and corporate leaders need to be stroked, even if you don’t work for them; that the best-intentioned reforms can trigger unintended consequences; and that national celebrity can create trouble at home.

Textbook Rant

Seth Godin:

‘ve spent the last few months looking at marketing textbooks. I’m assuming that they are fairly representative of textbooks in general, and since this is a topic I’m interested in, it seemed like a good area to focus on.
As far as I can tell, assigning a textbook to your college class is academic malpractice.
They are expensive. $50 is the low end, $200 is more typical. A textbook author in Toronto made enough money from his calculus textbook to afford a $20 million house. This is absurd on its face. There’s no serious insight or leap in pedagogy involved in writing a standard textbook. That’s what makes it standard. It’s hard, but it shouldn’t make you a millionaire.
They don’t make change. Textbooks have very little narrative. They don’t take you from a place of ignorance to a place of insight. Instead, even the best marketing textbooks surround you with a fairly non-connected series of vocabulary words, oversimplified problems and random examples.
They’re out of date and don’t match the course. The 2009-2010 edition of the MKTG textbook, which is the hippest I could find, has no entries in the index for Google, Twitter, or even Permission Marketing.
They don’t sell the topic. Textbooks today are a lot more colorful and breezy than they used to be, but they are far from engaging or inspirational. No one puts down a textbook and says, “yes, this is what I want to do!”

For Rio Vista grads, the future looks grim

Carolyn Jones:

For the Rio Vista High School class of 2009, there’s not much pomp but plenty of circumstance.
Like most seniors, the 82 graduating in Rio Vista last week face the most desolate economic landscape in generations, with few jobs and rapidly evaporating college aid. Many of their parents are out of work, and no one’s quite sure which way the out-of-control economy will flip next.
“I’m scared. Very, very scared,” said Chantell Bodle, 18, whose father’s job as a natural gas rig swabber has slowed to a crawl, forcing Chantell to opt for the cheapest possible route to her goal of becoming a nurse: live at home, work part time and commute 60 miles round trip to Delta College in Stockton.
“My parents said they’re having a hard time with the bills right now,” Chantell said last week as she spray-painted on a Rio Vista street as part of a senior art project. “It’s going to be hard out there. There’s not a lot of jobs.”

China’s College Entry Test Is an Obsession

Sharon LaFraniere:

For the past year, Liu Qichao has focused on one thing, and only one thing: the gao kao, or the high test.
Some prepare for the test at a strict Tianjin boarding school.
Fourteen to 16 hours a day, he studied for the college entrance examination, which this year will determine the fate of more than 10 million Chinese students. He took one day off every three weeks.
He was still carrying his textbook from room to room last Sunday morning before leaving for the exam site, still reviewing materials during the lunch break, still hard at work Sunday night, preparing for Part 2 of the exam that Monday.
“I want to study until the last minute,” he said. “I really hope to be successful.”
China may be changing at head-twirling speed, but the ritual of the gao kao (pronounced gow kow) remains as immutable as chopsticks. One Chinese saying compares the exam to a stampede of “a thousand soldiers and 10 horses across a single log bridge.”

Community members learn safer ways to get to school

Kathy Chang:

bright lime-green T-shirts, groups of parents, students and teachers of the 16 elementary schools in Woodbridge Township and residents in the surrounding areas volunteered their time over the weekend to be part of making the routes to their individual schools safer.
Top and above: Teacher Beth Heagen, from Woodbine Avenue Elementary School No. 23 in Avenel, leads Bhavika Shah and her children Hetri, 8, a third-grader, and Ishika, 6, a firstgrader, as they travel through the streets that they and other students walk each day to get to school, looking for unsafe conditions as well as positive ones.
Dr. Wansoo Im, president of Vertices LLC, a GIS consulting firm, and a professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, led the group of a dozen or so people at Woodbine Avenue Elementary School No. 23 in Avenel to kick off the Discovering Safe Routes to School event, which was a walkability assessment, on May 30.
Each person was given a pedometer and took a map of the route, a survey and a digital camera to take photographs of what each one felt needed improvement, such as implementation of sidewalks, dangerous street crossings and overgrown shrubbery, and also what the participants felt worked well in the area.
“This event is an outgrowth of the walk we took with former Olympic racewalker [Mark Fenton] last year,” said Mayor John E. McCormac. “Our job as public officials is to keep the kids safe. What is safe to us might not be what is safe to an 8-year-old kid. The kids walk these routes every day.”

Teen sacrifices fun for hard work, education

Carolyn Jones:

While her classmates were signing yearbooks and preening for the prom, Vicheka Chres was experiencing a different kind of senioritis as she approached Friday’s graduation.
As she had since she started high school, Vicheka, 17, was studying six hours a night. After school and on weekends, she was making apple turnovers in her uncle’s bakery – for no pay. At home, she was translating for her mother, whose English is poor and who has a sixth-grade education.
“Fun? I don’t really have fun,” Vicheka said recently while taking a break from swabbing tables at Rio Vista Bakery, where her mother also works. “I know American kids go see movies, concerts. Go shopping. But that’s not what I do.”
Vicheka has reason to be motivated. She knows that if her family had stayed in their native Cambodia, which they left in 2003, she wouldn’t have had the luxury of studying trigonometry and literature six hours a night. She’d be working in a factory, sewing clothes 12 hours a day for $50 a month.
Instead, she’s bound for UC Davis. She plans to study biochemistry so she can eventually be a pharmacist and support her family, those in Rio Vista as well as in Phnom Penh.

Scholastic Programs Are Feeling the Pinch as Financing for Sports Dries Up

AP:

Tyler Peters has wrapped up his high school athletic career. Now he can only feel sympathy for his friends who are underclassmen at Coral Gables Senior High.
Across the country this spring, the recession has taken its toll on high school athletic programs. As states and school districts have tried to shore up their budgets, Florida has taken some of the most drastic steps.
The Florida High School Athletic Association is considering sweeping, two-year schedule changes with all sports except football canceling some matches, meets or games. The changes were approved earlier this year, but officials backed off the plan, saying they would take it up again at a later date.
A swimmer in high school, the 18-year-old Peters said he might have given it up if his season had been cut down.

Our Changing World



This graphic, from Boeing’s Current Market Outlook (2009-2028) provides a very useful look at the changes our children are facing. The Asia Pacific region is forecast to take delivery of more airplanes than North America, with Europe close behind. We should substantively consider whether the current systems, curriculum and organizations, largely created in the Frederick Taylor model over 100 years ago, are up to the challenge….
Locally, the Madison School District’s Proposed Strategic Plan will be discussed Monday evening.
Related: China Dominates NSA Coding Contest.

Global Academy Presentation to the Dane County Public Affairs Council Audio / Video


Watch the May 27, 2009 video here, or listen via this mp3 audio file.
Bill Reis: Coordinator, Global Academy [Former Superintendent, Middleton-Cross Plains School District]
Dean Gorrell: Superintendent, Verona Area Schools
To a significant degree talented and gifted students in our schools are under-served. These students are often left to do it on their own, particularly if that talent is in only one or two areas.  Finally, there is something being done about that.  Not only is the Global Academy going to be a reality, but surprise beyond belief, eight area school districts, including Madison, are actually cooperating and going to be part of the Global Academy.  The presentation and discussion will focus on

What is the rationale and data to support this educational experience?
What school districts are involved and how will it be financed?
What students will be served by the Academy? How will students be selected?
What will be the curriculum and methodology for instruction?
Will these students be prepared for post high school education and work?
Will there be partnerships with MATC, other colleges and universities, community persons and organizations?
How will the students relate with their home schools?

Thanks to Jeff Henriques for recording this event.

Connecticut District Retools High School Math Instruction

Jessica Calefati:

Mathematics teachers in one coastal Connecticut school district were frustrated with students’ inability to retain what they learned in Algebra I and apply it to Algebra II, so they decided to approach high school mathematics instruction in a new way. The teachers shrank the number of topics covered in each course by about half and published their custom-made curriculum online last fall, the New York Times reports.
The new curriculum’s lessons were written by Westport, Conn., teachers and sent to HeyMath! of India, a company that adds graphics, animation, and sound to the lessons before posting them on the Web. But teachers say the new curriculum is as much about bringing classroom instruction into the digital age as it is about having the opportunity to teach students fewer concepts in greater depth.
Westport’s decision to rewrite its math curriculum is part of a growing trend to re-evaluate “mile-wide, inch-deep” instruction. In 2006, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics pushed for more basic math skills instruction, and two years later a federal panel of investigators appointed by then President George W. Bush also urged schools to whittle down their elementary and middle school math curricula.

Will Federal Education Standards Help US Students?

Dave Cook:

Education Secretary Arne Duncan threw his weight Wednesday behind a Text”common” education standard for all of America’s schoolchildren, saying the current state-by-state system has produced uneven results in which some students “are totally, inadequately prepared to go into a competitive university, let alone graduate.”
Mr. Duncan, who has been on a cross-country “listening tour” in preparation for submitting revisions for the No Child Left Behind Act, says he’s encountered support for the idea of a national standard. “Teachers have been really positive on this idea of common standards,” he said at a Monitor-sponsored breakfast for reporters. “That has played much better with teachers than I thought it would.”

Alaska Opts Out of US National Standards Initiative

Jessica Calefati:

Gov. Sarah Palin has opted out of an effort to develop national education standards for reading and math curricula, a decision that has riled some but satisfied other Alaskan education officials, the Anchorage Daily News reports.
Forty-six states have agreed to help create the Common Core State Standards Initiative, an effort to allow states to compare their students’ academic progress at each grade level using a single rubric. Alaska joins Missouri, South Carolina, and Texas on the shortlist of states that have bowed out of the attempt to form what many believe education in the United States has lacked for too long: a common denominator.
Carol Comeau, superintendent of the Anchorage School District, said she was disappointed in Palin’s decision. Alaska’s pupils have a right to know how they measure up against their peers in other parts of the country, Comeau said. The Anchorage School District serves nearly half of Alaska’s 120,000 public school students.

Wisconsin high schools webcast graduations to reach wider audience

Amy Hetzner:

While iQ Academy Wisconsin can reach students statewide through lessons taught over the Internet, that doesn’t mean all 128 graduates can reach the academy for Sunday’s commencement at Waukesha South High School.
So, for the first time, the school is offering a webcast of its graduation, which students and their relatives can watch in streaming video as names are called out and awards are distributed.
“A lot of our students live pretty far from Waukesha,” said iQ Principal Rick Nettesheim, who estimates about two-thirds of the graduating class will be at commencement this year. “Now they can participate in the graduation or, if they have friends or family that live far away, they can participate, too.”
The Waukesha-based charter school is one of a growing number of high schools to broadcast their graduation ceremonies over the Internet, allowing far-flung friends or family members who couldn’t travel or get tickets to participate in once-in-a-lifetime events.
Henry Holmes, 18, said the webcast will allow his grandfather in Waupun to watch as he picks up his iQ diploma.

Teenage readers are gravitating toward even grimmer fiction; suicide notes and death matches

Katie Roiphe:

Until recently, the young-adult fiction section at your local bookstore was a sea of nubile midriffs set against pink and turquoise backgrounds. Today’s landscape features haunted girls staring out from dark or washed-out covers. Current young-adult best sellers include one suicide, one deadly car wreck, one life-threatening case of anorexia and one dystopian universe in which children fight to the death. Somewhere along the line our teenagers have become connoisseurs of disaster.
Jay Asher’s “Thirteen Reasons Why,” which is narrated by a dead girl, came out in March 2007 and remains on the bestseller list in hardcover. The book is the account of a fragile freshman named Hannah Baker who kills herself by overdosing on pills and sends audiotapes to the 13 people she holds responsible for making her miserable in the last year of her life. There may be parents who are alarmed that their 12-year-olds are reading about suicide, or librarians who want to keep the book off the shelves, but the story is clearly connecting with its audience–the book has sold over 200,000 copies, according to Nielsen BookScan.
For those young readers who find death by pill overdose inadequately gruesome, there’s Gayle Forman’s “If I Stay,” which takes as its subject a disfiguring car wreck. The book has sold a robust 17,000 copies in its first two months on sale, and was optioned by Catherine Hardwicke, the director of the film “Twilight.” The story follows an appealing cellist named Mia who goes on a drive to a bookstore with her unusually sympathetic ex-punk-rocker parents. When a truck barrels into their Buick, Mia hovers ghost-like over the scene. She sees her family’s bodies crushed, then watches on as her own mangled body is bagged and rushed to the hospital. Lingering somewhere between this world and the next, Mia must decide whether to join her parents in the afterlife or go it alone in the real world. The brilliance of the book is the simplicity with which it captures the fundamental dilemma of adolescence: How does one separate from one’s parents and forge an independent identity?

A Team’s Struggle Shows Disparity in Girls’ Sports

Katie Thomas:

The Cougars of Middle School 61 had a basketball game in the Bronx, but a half-hour before tipoff, six girls and Coach Bryan Mariner were still inching through traffic in Brooklyn.
A cellphone rang. It belonged to forward Tiffany Fields-Binning, who passed the phone to Mr. Mariner.
“You don’t want her to go?” he said. He peered up at a street sign. “We’re on Atlantic and Flatbush.” He paused. “O.K. O.K. We’ll wait here.”
Mr. Mariner turned off the ignition. “Tiff-a-ny.” He said her name slowly, like a sigh. “You didn’t set this straight with your pop?”
Tiffany stared out a window.
Mr. Mariner turned and assessed the situation: “We’ve got five.”
Five players. No substitutes.

Marketplace’ will help rein in college costs: Duncan

Lynn Sweet:

Education Secretary Arne Duncan, the former Chicago Public Schools chief and basketball buddy of President Obama, says the “marketplace” will work to keep university costs down.
And he seems intrigued with the notion of developing “no-frills” campus options for financially strapped students.
Duncan has moved his family from Hyde Park in Chicago to the northern Virginia suburbs, where his kids go to a public school. I caught up with Duncan at a breakfast with reporters last week.
He has been on his own “listening tour” of the nation to figure out what needs to be changed in the No Child Left Behind law. He said he has no timetable for asking Congress to rewrite the controversial Bush-era program.
The economic stimulus measure has given Duncan $10 billion in discretionary spending. By comparison, President George W. Bush’s first education secretary, Rod Paige, had only $17 million in the cash drawer to pass around.
Duncan said he wants to use some of the federal money as an incentive to “change behavior” when it comes to college expenses.

Leopold Elementary does it bilingually

Darlinne Kambwa:

In a classroom with walls lined with bright pictures, Erin Conway’s third- and fourth-grade students are working on mathematical word problems. For the first time in their relatively short educational careers, the problems are in English.
“I think I know the answer,” a student tells Conway. But then he gives her the wrong answer.
“It’s not that hard,” Conway says, repeating the question to him in Spanish. The second time the student tells Conway the right answer.
The classroom looks the same as other third-grade classrooms. The top of the black chalkboard is bordered with the alphabet in cursive. Each number on the clock has its handwritten digital equivalent next to it. The student desks with attached chairs open up to reveal school supplies.
But the population of Conway’s classroom makes it different. All of her 16 students are native Spanish speakers, in what’s called a transitional education program.
As kindergartners at Leopold Elementary, on Madison’s west side, the students were placed in classrooms where 90% of their academic instruction was given in Spanish and 10% in English. In second grade, 80% of their instruction was in Spanish and 20% in English.

Wisconsin Math Standards

From a recent post on the Madison United for Academic Excellence (MUAE) listserve:

There is an effort under way to rewrite the Wisconsin math state standards. Comments from the public are invited until this coming Monday (June 15).
Some math professors at UW-Madison believe the draft could use some improvement and encourage folks to review the standards and submit comments via a survey all of which can found at: http://dpi.wi.gov/cal/standards-revisions.html

Another website with standards that can be used for comparison is: http://www.achieve.org/node/479 Achieve is one of the organizations that are involved in drafting the
national standards-to-be. The governor has agreed to enroll in the group of States that will align the standards of the state with the national standards the Obama administration is pushing for.

Which States Have the Best High School Graduation Rates

Jessica Calefiti:

President Obama expects all Americans to complete at least one year of postsecondary education, and a report released this week by Education Week highlights both the obstacles to attaining that goal and the hopeful signs that–at least in some states–success appears to be within reach.
“Diploma Count 2009” places the national graduation rate at about 70 percent for the class of 2006 and notes that this rate has increased nearly 3 percentage points since 1996. According to the report, New Jersey has the highest rate, 82.1 percent; Nevada has the lowest, 47.3 percent. But with about 30 percent of American students failing to graduate high school, and many other qualified students opting out of the college application process, the report states, Obama’s goal can easily seem unrealistic

College in Need Closes a Door to Needy Students

Jonathan Glater:

The admissions team at Reed College, known for its free-spirited students, learned in March that the prospective freshman class it had so carefully composed after weeks of reviewing essays, scores and recommendations was unworkable.
Money was the problem. Too many of the students needed financial aid, and the college did not have enough. So the director of financial aid gave the team another task: drop more than 100 needy students before sending out acceptances, and substitute those who could pay full freight.
The whole idea of excluding a student simply because of money clashed with the college’s ideals, Leslie Limper, the aid director, acknowledged. “None of us are very happy,” she said, adding that Reed did not strike anyone from its list last year and that never before had it needed to weed out so many worthy students. “Sometimes I wonder why I’m still doing this.”

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: The US Fiscal Black Hole

Willem Bueter:

It does not yet include price tag for the laudable ambition of the Obama administration to ensure that no American is without health insurance. Nor does it include planned government outlays for updating America’s clapped-out infrastructure or the pursuit of the environmental agenda. Bringing American secondary education (numeracy, literacy, foreign language skills etc.) up to the levels of the most successful emerging markets will also be very expensive, although more government money is only a necessary condition for significant progress in this area; a major change in the governance arrangements for schools in the incentives faced by teachers, heads, pupils and parents are also necessary. And I cannot really envisage Obama confronting the American Federation of Teachers. Without reform in governance and incentives, even vastly increased public spending on health and education will achieve in the US what it achieved the UK under Labour in the past six years: very little indeed.

The Genius Index: One Scientist’s Crusade to Rewrite Reputation Rules

Guy Gugliotta:

Jorge Hirsch had been getting screwed. For years. At a scientific conference in 1989, he presented a paper arguing that the generally accepted theory of low-temperature superconductors–the BCS theory–was wrong. Most researchers at the time held that under certain low-temperature conditions, vibrations in a metal’s crystal lattice can allow electrons to become attracted to one another, which drops electrical resistance to zero–a superconducting state. Hirsch said this “electron-phonon interaction” in fact had nothing to do with superconductivity. He was a youngish up-and-comer then, but physics rarely forgives apostasy. After his fateful presentation, similar conferences stopped inviting him to speak. Colleagues no longer sought him out for collaboration. Grants dried up. High-visibility journals shunned his papers.
It’s not that Hirsch wasn’t getting his work published. He was. And other physicists were still citing his research, implying some acceptance of his views. Hirsch just wasn’t able to get his papers into the really high-visibility journals–places like Science, Nature, and, for a solid-state physicist, Physical Review Letters. There’s a clear pecking order, established and reinforced by several independent rating systems. Chief among them: the Journal Impact Factor.

Shocker! Some Teachers Like AP for All

Jay Matthews:

When I got to work Monday, I was certain I was about to be pummeled by e-mails telling me what an idiotic column I had written that day praising high schools that were trying to get everyone, even struggling students, to take Advanced Placement courses and tests.
The first e-mail had arrived at 7:56 a.m. I opened it gingerly, expecting harsh language. It was from a teacher — not a good sign. Many of them find my AP obsession an outrage, particularly since I have never taught a class and would not be competent to do so.
So what did the e-mailer, Michael Willis, a physics teacher at Glen Burnie High School in Anne Arundel County, have to say? He said he liked the column. Hmmm. Maybe he was being sarcastic? Nope. He said he retired from a career in nuclear engineering to teach physics at all levels, including AP, and said “having such low performers in a class does them a world of good.” He even offered a rationale for low performers in AP I hadn’t thought of: “In these days of economic woe, schools with a historically large percentage of low performance may more easily rationalize the targeting of such classes for cutting due to low enrollments. This would have the effect of locking out the ‘smart’ kids from classes they need to be competitive with students from districts and schools that are more affluent.”

Obama’s Charter Stimulus

Wall Street Journal Editorial:

The Obama Administration’s $100 billion in “stimulus” for schools has mostly been a free lunch — the cash dispensed by formula in return for vague promises of reform. So we were glad to hear that Education Secretary Arne Duncan is now planning to spend some of that money to press states on charter schools.



“States that don’t have charter school laws, or put artificial caps on the growth of charter schools, will jeopardize their application” for some $5 billion in federal grant money, Mr. Duncan said in a conference call with reporters this week. “Simply put, they put themselves at a competitive disadvantage for the largest pool of discretionary dollars states have ever had access to.”



Charter schools improve public education by giving parents options and forcing schools to compete for students and resources. For low-income minority families, these schools are often the only chance at a decent education. Charters are nonetheless opposed by teachers unions and others who like the status quo, no matter how badly it’s serving students. As a result, 10 states lack laws that allow charter schools (see nearby table), and 26 others cap charter enrollment.



To his credit, Mr. Duncan singled out some of the worst anticharter states. “Maine is one of 10 states without a charter schools law, but the state legislature has tabled a bill to create one,” he said. “Tennessee has not moved on a bill to lift enrollment restrictions. Indiana’s legislature is considering putting a moratorium on new charter schools. These actions are restricting reform, not encouraging it.”

Public Debt: The biggest bill in history



The Economist:

THE worst global economic storm since the 1930s may be beginning to clear, but another cloud already looms on the financial horizon: massive public debt. Across the rich world governments are borrowing vast amounts as the recession reduces tax revenue and spending mounts–on bail-outs, unemployment benefits and stimulus plans. New figures from economists at the IMF suggest that the public debt of the ten leading rich countries will rise from 78% of GDP in 2007 to 114% by 2014. These governments will then owe around $50,000 for every one of their citizens (see article).
Not since the second world war have so many governments borrowed so much so quickly or, collectively, been so heavily in hock. And today’s debt surge, unlike the wartime one, will not be temporary. Even after the recession ends few rich countries will be running budgets tight enough to stop their debt from rising further. Worse, today’s borrowing binge is taking place just before a slow-motion budget-bust caused by the pension and health-care costs of a greying population. By 2050 a third of the rich world’s population will be over 60. The demographic bill is likely to be ten times bigger than the fiscal cost of the financial crisis.
Will they default, inflate or manage their way out?

Related: earmarks, K-12 Tax & Spending Climate.

Summer Fun

June means the end of high school and the start of summer. Perhaps there will be jobs or other chores, but, as James Russell Lowell wrote in The Vision of Sir Launfal, “what is so rare as a day in June? Then, if ever, come perfect days…”
Those rare June days are full of mild air, sunshine, leisure, and time, at last, for student to pick up that absorbing nonfiction book for which there has been no place in their high school curriculum.
Why is it that so many, if not most, of our high school graduates arrive in college without ever having read a single complete nonfiction book in high school, so that when they confront their college reading lists, full of such books, they are somewhat at sea?
The main reason is that the English department controls reading in most schools, and for most of them the only reading of interest is fiction, so that is all that students are asked to read.
For the boys, and now the girls too, who may soon serve in the military, and are interested in military history, they have to read the military history books they will enjoy on their own, after school or, better, in the summer. All the students who would love history books on any topic would do well to pick them up in the summer, when their other assignments, of fiction books and the like, cannot interfere.
The story of the world’s work and the issues that trouble the world now (and in the past) can only be found in nonfiction books, and for students who can see the time coming when they will be responsible for the work of the world, those are the books which they should read, and have time to read, mainly in the summer months.
Summer reading of nonfiction books also means that when they return to their history, economics, sociology, and even their science and English classes in the fall, they will bring a more substantial and more nuanced understanding of the world they will be studying, with the benefit of the knowledge and appreciation they have gained in their nonfiction reading over the summer.
For those who are concerned with “Summer Loss”–the observed decline in student knowledge and skill over the summer months–the reading of nonfiction books brings a double benefit. The habit and the skill of reading significant material are refreshed and reinforced in that way, and knowledge is gained rather than drained away over the summer. And in addition, engagement with serious topics confirms young people in their primary role as students rather than “just kids” as they read over the summer.
Adults still buy and read a lot of nonfiction books, even in these days of the Internet/Web and Television, and students will have a much better chance of taking part in adult conversations over the summer if they are reading books too.
The objection will surely be raised in some quarters that reading nonfiction books in the summer is too much like work. One answer that could be offered is that, as reported in Diploma to Nowhere, more than a million of our high school graduates every year, who are accepted at colleges, are required to take remedial courses because they have not worked hard enough to be ready for regular courses. The problem then may actually be that our high schools are too much fun and not enough work and we give our diplomas to far too many “fools” as a result.
Malcolm Gladwell, in Outliers, cites K. Anders Ericsson’s research on the difference between amateur and professional pianists, and writes: “Their research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top musical school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t just work harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.”
We see those who labor constantly to relieve our students from working too hard academically. They worry about stress, strain, overwork, joyless lives, etc. But that only seems to apply to academics. When it comes to sports, there is nearly universal satisfaction with young athletes who dedicate themselves to their fitness and the skills needed for their sport(s) not only after school, but during the summer as well.
While reading nonfiction books in the summer has not yet been widely accepted or required, high school athletes are expected to run, lift weights, stretch, and shoot hoops (or whatever it takes for their sports) as often in the summer as they can find the time. Perhaps if we applied the seriousness with which we take sports for young people to their pursuit of academic achievement, we would find more students reading complete nonfiction books in the summer and fewer needing remedial courses later.
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®

Data-Driven Schools See Rising Scores

John Hechinger:

Last fall, high-school senior Duane Wilson started getting Ds on assignments in his Advanced Placement history, psychology and literature classes. Like a smoke detector sensing fire, a school computer sounded an alarm.
The Edline system used by the Montgomery County, Md., Public Schools emailed each poor grade to his mother as soon as teachers logged it in. Coretta Brunton, Duane’s mother, sat her son down for a stern talk. Duane hit the books and began earning Bs. He is headed to Atlanta’s Morehouse College in the fall.
If it hadn’t been for the tracking system, says the 17-year-old, “I might have failed and I wouldn’t be going to college next year.”
Montgomery County has made progress in improving the lagging academic performance of African-American and Hispanic students. See data.
Montgomery spends $47 million a year on technology like Edline. It is at the vanguard of what is known as the “data-driven” movement in U.S. education — an approach that builds on the heavy testing of President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law. Using district-issued Palm Pilots, for instance, teachers can pull up detailed snapshots of each student’s progress on tests and other measures of proficiency.
The high-tech strategy, which uses intensified assessments and the real-time collection of test scores, grades and other data to identify problems and speed up interventions, has just received a huge boost from President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

Related notes and links: Wisconsin Knowledge & Concepts (WKCE) Exam, Value Added Assessments, Standards Based Report Cards and Infinite Campus.
Tools such as Edline, if used pervasively, can be very powerful. They can also save a great deal of time and money.

Wisconsin Democrats vote for student cap in Milwaukee’s school-choice program

Steve Walters, Stacy Forster & Patrick Marley:

Democrats who control the state Assembly voted Thursday to cap participation in Milwaukee’s parental choice program at 19,500 students for the next two years – about the same number of students who now attend private schools at state expense.
If it becomes law, the change would reverse a 2006 compromise that would have allowed participation to grow to 22,500.
The 19,500 cap was added to the state budget, which the full Assembly was scheduled to debate at 10 a.m. Friday, by state Rep. Fred Kessler (D-Milwaukee). It was one of the final decisions made by the 52 Democrats, who ended four days of closed-door caucus meetings that resulted in dozens of proposed changes to the 2010-’11 budget.
Assembly Speaker Mike Sheridan (D-Janesville) said Democrats will have enough votes to pass the budget Friday.
“When you look at the document, it’s well-balanced, and I think we did a lot of good things,” Sheridan said.
An opponent of the choice program, Kessler said it would be the first major reduction in the number of choice students – a number that had been expected to grow next year.
The two-year budget includes $2 billion in tax and fee increases, cuts aid to local governments and schools and would force 6% across-the-board spending cuts by state agencies.
But choice supporters said the cap would be fought in both the Assembly and Senate.

Gifted education audit in Waukesha

Amy Hetzner via a kind reader’s email:

In the year that the Waukesha School District laid off all but one staff member devoted to gifted and talented education, identification of students for the gifted program dropped 29%, according to an audit by the state Department of Public Instruction.
Nominations of students for the gifted program dropped even more — by 65% — in the 2007-’08 school year. This followed a school year in which nominations and identifications already were down from the year before.
At the time they made the GT staff cuts, Waukesha school board members said they hoped that regular classroom teachers would take on the task of providing special programming for gifted students, as required by state law.
But district officials acknowledge difficulty without speciality staff.
“Any time you have budget reductions it is going to have an effect,” Ben Hunsanger, Waukesha’s new GT coordinator, said in an e-mail. “There was a drop in GT identifications because we lost GT resource teachers. The GT student population also lost direct resources as a result of the staffing reductions.”

So much hinges on that high school education

Bill Foy:

Volunteering as a GED program tutor continues to be one of my most gratifying experiences, but it also has been sobering to realize how many in our community lack basic – high school – education. (GED is the acronym for general equivalency degree, a recognized substitute for a high school diploma.)
Students in GED programs range in age from the mid-20s to the late 40s; many are minorities. They say they’ve recommitted themselves to furthering their education in order to enhance job skills, to help their children succeed with their education or simply, but profoundly, to regain some self-esteem. GED programs are a lifeline to those who have the courage to “go back” later in life to achieve these goals, but the programs currently serve just a fraction of those who lack a high school education.
You get a sense of the magnitude of the problem by reading a 2008 publication of the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center called “Cities in Crisis.” The study, which was funded in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, looks at the 50 largest cities in the United States (Milwaukee is No. 25) and the number of kids enrolled in high school in the “focal” district of each city (in our case Milwaukee Public Schools). In the year studied – 2006 – MPS’s high school population (grades nine through 12) was estimated to be 25,000.

Physical Stress and Academic Performance

Sara Goldrick-Rab:

I’ve been preoccupied by sleep lately. Not sleeping — though as I approach the end of my first trimester I sure could use some — but sleep itself. What it means to sleep a little or a lot, how it affects your daily interactions with others, etc. This is something I know a tiny bit about, having spent a solid year sleep-deprived after the birth of my first child, but not something I’ve devoted my academic time to.
Until now. I just spent two full days at the Cells to Society (C2S) Summer Biomarker Institute. C2S is also known as the Center on Social Disparities and Health at Northwestern University. It’s directed by developmental psychologist Lindsay Chase-Lansdale, and has additional star power in folks like Thom McDade, Emma Adam, and Chris Kuzawa. These are social science researchers who have mastered the hard sciences as well, and are using medical tools to get at how social practices and environments “get under the skin.”
What does that mean? Well, to explain I’ll tell you why I’m thinking about sleep. It all begins with an attempt to understand the reasons why so many low-income kids drop out of college. A big problem, to be sure — and one that we still don’t know enough about. I’m thinking that has to do with the limited number of ways in which we’ve approached the problem. It’s primarily treated as an educational issue, one we tackle with a combination of college practices and individual-level incentives like money.

Alternative Testing on the Rise

Michael Alison Chandler:

hese were not multiple-choice tests that computers grade in seconds. They were thick “portfolio” tests representing a year’s worth of student worksheets, quizzes and activities. The time-intensive evaluations have proliferated in recent years in response to the testing requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind law.
The District and many states, including Maryland and Virginia, use portfolios for students with serious cognitive disabilities. But Virginia has gone much further, expanding their use for students with learning disabilities or beginning English skills. Statewide, the number of math and reading portfolios submitted for such students nearly doubled in a year, from 15,400 in 2006-07 to more than 30,000 in 2007-08, and state officials predict another jump this school year.
Portfolios have long been used for in-depth evaluations because they can gauge more skills and higher-order thinking. Many educators say the year-long portfolios are a fairer way to measure what some students know than a one-day snapshot.
“We all learn differently,” said Patrick K. Murphy, assistant superintendent for accountability in Fairfax schools and Arlington County’s incoming superintendent. “We also have to recognize there are different ways people can show proficiency beyond a multiple-choice test.”

Schwarzenegger seeks online revolution in schools

Juliet Williams:

In the state that gave the world Facebook, Google and the iPod, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger says forcing California’s students to rely on printed textbooks is so yesterday.
The governor recently launched an initiative to see if the state’s 6 million public school students can use more online learning materials, perhaps saving millions of dollars a year in textbook purchases.
“California is home to software giants, bioscience research pioneers and first-class university systems known around the world. But our students still learn from instructional materials in formats made possible by Gutenberg’s printing press,” Schwarzenegger wrote in a recent op-ed in the San Jose Mercury News.
In a state with a projected $24 billion budget deficit, Schwarzenegger has asked education officials to review a wealth of sources that already are on the Internet, many of which are free, and determine whether they meet curriculum standards.

Microsoft Anti-Trust Settlement Generates Some Cash for Wisconsin Schools

Erin Richards:

In a sea of otherwise bleak budget news, 850 schools in Wisconsin are looking at an unexpected windfall: a share of at least $75 million from Microsoft Corp. for new technology purchases.
According to estimates released this week by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, schools where at least 33.3% of the students qualify as low-income will split about $75 million to $80 million in vouchers that can be redeemed for cash after the schools purchase new hardware or software.
The money for eligible schools is part of a settlement from a class-action antitrust lawsuit that Microsoft reached with Wisconsin residents in 2006. Other states have reached similar settlements with Microsoft. Plaintiffs claimed that Microsoft stifled competition and harmed consumers.
Eligible schools may redeem their vouchers for cash after buying new desktop computers, laptops, printers, scanners, faxes and software, none of which has to be from Microsoft, said Stephen Sanders, director of instructional media and technology for the DPI.

It would be interesting to compare these amounts with the royalties districts have paid to Microsoft……

Is AP for All A Formula For Failure?

Jay Matthews:

pend much time with aggressive Advanced Placement teachers. They tell me, quite often, that students must be stretched beyond their assumed capabilities. Whenever I try to pass on this advice, however, I become a target for ridicule and disbelief from readers.
Here comes more of that stuff. Newsweek unveils this week my annual rankings of America’s Top High Schools, with a new twist that skeptics will find even less congenial.
The latest list, to appear on newsweek.com, will include about 1,500 schools that have reached a high standard of participation on college-level AP, International Baccalaureate or Cambridge tests. The bad news is they represent less than 6 percent of U.S. public high schools. The good news is that 73 percent of Washington area schools are on the list. The interesting news is that some of those schools have begun to require AP courses and tests for all students, even those who struggle in class.

2 Madison Elementary Schools Fail No Child Left Behind Standards

Gayle Worland:

For the first time, two Madison elementary schools will face sanctions for failing to meet federal No Child Left Behind standards.
Leopold and Lincoln fell short of the federal law’s criteria for “adequate yearly progress” for the second year in a row, marking them as “schools identified for improvement,” or SIFI. The SIFI list targets schools that miss the same testing benchmark, such as reading scores among economically disadvantaged students, for two or more consecutive years.
Under the sanctions, the schools will have to review their school improvement plans, offer more academic services outside of the regular school day and allow parents to transfer their child to any public school within the School District where space allows. Students performing poorly on statewide tests would get first preference to transfer.

Former Madison Mayor Paul Soglin comments.

Wisconsin Assembly Democrats Approve a $500,000 Earmark for the Madison School District’s 4K Program

Jason Stein:

The hope of four-year-old kindergarten in Madison schools stayed alive early Thursday as Assembly Democrats pushed through a $500,000 start-up grant for the district as part of the state budget bill.
But even with that money, the challenges to offering the program remain great as the district could face an $8 million cut in its state aid, or 13 percent, under one new estimate of the effect of state budget cuts on Madison schools.
And Republicans criticized the grant money to the district as an earmark that comes at a time when schools statewide are having their funding cut.
“Any funding that can help mitigate the (four-year-old kindergarten) costs in the first two years is very helpful,” said Madison Schools superintendent Dan Nerad. “We’re very pleased with the proposal that’s been advanced.”

Fascinating.

Underworked American Children

The Economist:

ut when it comes to the young the situation is reversed. American children have it easier than most other children in the world, including the supposedly lazy Europeans. They have one of the shortest school years anywhere, a mere 180 days compared with an average of 195 for OECD countries and more than 200 for East Asian countries. German children spend 20 more days in school than American ones, and South Koreans over a month more. Over 12 years, a 15-day deficit means American children lose out on 180 days of school, equivalent to an entire year.
American children also have one of the shortest school days, six-and-a-half hours, adding up to 32 hours a week. By contrast, the school week is 37 hours in Luxembourg, 44 in Belgium, 53 in Denmark and 60 in Sweden. On top of that, American children do only about an hour’s-worth of homework a day, a figure that stuns the Japanese and Chinese.
Americans also divide up their school time oddly. They cram the school day into the morning and early afternoon, and close their schools for three months in the summer. The country that tut-tuts at Europe’s mega-holidays thinks nothing of giving its children such a lazy summer. But the long summer vacation acts like a mental eraser, with the average child reportedly forgetting about a month’s-worth of instruction in many subjects and almost three times that in mathematics. American academics have even invented a term for this phenomenon, “summer learning loss”. This pedagogical understretch is exacerbating social inequalities. Poorer children frequently have no one to look after them in the long hours between the end of the school day and the end of the average working day. They are also particularly prone to learning loss. They fall behind by an average of over two months in their reading. Richer children actually improve their performance.

Gifted education audit in Waukesha

Amy Hetzner
Journal Sentinel
June 4, 2009

In the year that the Waukesha School District laid off all but one staff member devoted to gifted and talented education, identification of students for the gifted program dropped 29%, according to an audit by the state Department of Public Instruction.
Nominations of students for the gifted program dropped even more — by 65% — in the 2007-’08 school year. This followed a school year in which nominations and identifications already were down from the year before.
At the time they made the GT staff cuts, Waukesha school board members said they hoped that regular classroom teachers would take on the task of providing special programming for gifted students, as required by state law.
But district officials acknowledge difficulty without specialty staff.
“Any time you have budget reductions it is going to have an effect,” Ben Hunsanger, Waukesha’s new GT coordinator, said in an e-mail. “There was a drop in GT identifications because we lost GT resource teachers. The GT student population also lost direct resources as a result of the staffing reductions.”
In an April letter to Waukesha’s superintendent, the DPI recommended the district refine its methods for identifying students as gifted and talented and provide professional development for staff on providing special services for such students.
The state audit was performed after a group of district parents filed a complaint last year alleging numerous deficiencies in Waukesha’s program for gifted students.
One of those parents, Amy Gilgenbach, said she wishes the audit had focused less on policy corrections and more with what was going on in the program itself. She said the state agency should have looked into what happened to instruction due to the loss in staffing.
“At the elementary level, when you have already overburdened teachers with 28 or more kids in their classes and then expect them to take on added responsibilities without additional training or instruction, obviously you’re not creating a good situation for GT students in those classes,” she wrote in an e-mail.
“At the middle and high school levels, not having appropriate guidance and course selections and potential college and career paths is a huge pitfall for GT students.”

Report From China: “Novels are not taught in class, and teachers encourage outside reading of histories rather than fiction.”

Annie Osborn in the Boston Globe:

Teen’s lessons from China. I am a product of an American private elementary school and public high school, and I am accustomed to classrooms so boisterous that it can be considered an accomplishment for a teacher to make it through a 45-minute class period without handing out a misdemeanor mark. It’s no wonder that the atmosphere at Yanqing No. 1 Middle School (“middle school” is the translation of the Chinese term for high school), for students in grades 10-12, seems stifling to me. Discipline problems are virtually nonexistent, and punishments like lowered test scores are better deterrents for rule breaking than detentions you can sleep through.
But what does surprise me is that, despite the barely controlled chaos that simmers just below the surface during my classes at Boston Latin School, I feel as though I have learned much, much more under the tutelage of Latin’s teachers than I ever could at a place like Yanqing Middle School, which is located in a suburb of Beijing called Yanqing.
Students spend their days memorizing and doing individual, silent written drills or oral drills in total unison. Their entire education is geared toward memorizing every single bit of information that could possibly materialize on, first, their high school entrance exams, and next, their college entrance exams. This makes sense, because admission to public high schools and universities in China is based entirely on test scores (although very occasionally a rich family can buy an admission spot for their child), and competition in the world’s most populous country to go to the top schools makes the American East Coast’s Harvard-or-die mentality look puny.
Chinese students, especially those in large cities or prosperous suburbs and counties and even some in impoverished rural areas, have a more rigorous curriculum than any American student, whether at Charlestown High, Boston Latin, or Exeter. These students work under pressure greater than the vast majority of US students could imagine.

Continue reading Report From China: “Novels are not taught in class, and teachers encourage outside reading of histories rather than fiction.”

Truth In Teaching

NY Times Editorial:

Education reform will go nowhere until the states are forced to revamp corrupt teacher evaluation systems that rate a vast majority of teachers as “excellent,” even in schools where children learn nothing. Education Secretary Arne Duncan was right to require the states that participate in the school stabilization fund, which is part of the federal education stimulus program, to show — finally — how student achievement is weighted in teacher evaluations. The states have long resisted such accountability, and Mr. Duncan will need to press them hard to ensure they live up to their commitment.
A startling new report from a nonpartisan New York research group known as The New Teacher Project lays out the scope of the problem. The study, titled “The Widget Effect,” is based on surveys of more than 16,000 teachers and administrators in four states: Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois and Ohio.
The first problem it identifies is that evaluation sessions are often short, infrequent and pro forma — typically two or fewer classroom observations totaling 60 minutes or less. The administrators who perform them are rarely trained to do the evaluations and are under intense pressure from colleagues not to be critical. Not surprisingly, nearly every teacher passes, and an overwhelming majority receives top ratings.

Math & Science: China dominates NSA-backed coding contest

Patrick Thibodeau:

Programmers from China and Russia have dominated an international competition on everything from writing algorithms to designing components.
Whether the outcome of this competition is another sign that math and science education in the U.S. needs improvement may spur debate. But the fact remains: Of 70 finalists, 20 were from China, 10 from Russia and two from the U.S.
TopCoder Inc., which runs software competitions as part of its software development service, operates TopCoder Open, an annual contest.
About 4,200 people participated in the U.S. National Security Agency-supported challenge. The NSA has been sponsoring the program for a number of years because of its interest in hiring people with advanced skills.
Participants in the contest, which was open to anyone — from student to professional — and finished with 120 competitors from around the world, went through a process of elimination that finished this month in Las Vegas.
China’s showing in the finals was also helped by the sheer volume of its numbers, 894. India followed at 705, but none of its programmers were finalists. Russia had 380 participants; the United States, 234; Poland, 214; Egypt, 145; and Ukraine, 128, among others.

Learn from three success stories

Rising above IQ
Nicholas Kristoff
In the mosaic of America, three groups that have been unusually successful are Asian-Americans, Jews and West Indian blacks — and in that there may be some lessons for the rest of us. Asian-Americans are renowned — or notorious — for ruining grade curves in schools across the land, and as a result they constitute about 20 percent of students at Harvard College. As for Jews, they have received about one-third of all Nobel Prizes in science received by Americans. One survey found that a quarter of Jewish adults in the United States have earned a graduate degree, compared with 6 percent of the population as a whole. West Indian blacks, those like Colin Powell whose roots are in the Caribbean, are one-third more likely to graduate from college than African-Americans as a whole, and their median household income is almost one-third higher.
These three groups may help debunk the myth of success as a simple product of intrinsic intellect, for they represent three different races and histories. In the debate over nature and nurture, they suggest the importance of improved nurture — which, from a public policy perspective, means a focus on education. Their success may also offer some lessons for you, me, our children — and for the broader effort to chip away at poverty in this country.

America’s Top Public High Schools

Newsweek:

Public schools are ranked according to a ratio devised by Jay Mathews: the number of Advanced Placement, Intl. Baccalaureate and/or Cambridge tests taken by all students at a school in 2008 divided by the number of graduating seniors. All of the schools on the list have an index of at least 1.000; they are in the top 6 percent of public schools measured this way.
If you have questions about the list, please contact challenge@washpost.com. Note: Subs. Lunch % is the percentage of students receiving federally subsidized meals. E and E % stands for equity and excellence percentage: the portion of all graduating seniors at a school that had at least one passing grade on one AP or IB test. For more information on methodology, see our FAQ; please leave your comments on the list in the comments box below.

26 Wisconsin high schools made the list with Milwaukee’s Rufus King on top at #271 and, locally, Verona High School at #1021 the only Madison area institution on the list.

Samuel Beer

The Economist:

HIS hair turned no whiter than a pale auburn, and he was never caught standing on his head, but even in his advanced years Sam Beer continued to surprise–by playing the harmonica in bravura style, for example, or by coming 13th in a skydiving competition among 250 contestants half his age. The vitality that sparkled most brightly, though, was that of the mind. When Harvard’s grandest political scientists gathered last year to brief alumni on their activities, the former chairman of the department, then a mere 96, was asked to make a few comments about the study of government during his tenure from 1946 to 1982. “He completely stole the show,” said one. Speaking without notes, remembering everyone and everything, he upstaged all the incumbent professors.
Mr Beer was a formidable scholar, the author of countless articles and several books. The best of these, “British Politics in the Collectivist Age”, picked apart the country in which he had studied before the war and established him as the foremost authority on modern British politics (which was the title of the British edition). He wrote two other books on Britain, one on the Treasury and one on what he called “the decline of civic culture” or, more politely, “the rise of the new populism”. He also analysed his own country, notably in a book that examined the creation of the American nation through the twin lenses of history and political theory.

On California’s Hard Copy Textbook Purchase Ban

Rupert Neate:

“Textbooks are outdated, in my opinion,” said the film-star-turned-politician. “For so many years, we’ve been trying to teach exactly the same way. Our children get their information from the internet, downloaded on to their iPods, and in Twitter feeds to their phones. Basically, kids feel as comfortable with their electronic devices as I was with my pencils and crayons
“So why are California’s school students still forced to lug around antiquated, heavy, expensive textbooks?”
State officials said textbooks typically cost between $75 (£46) and $100, far more than their digital equivalents.
A spokesman for Pearson said it has been planning for the switch from printed text to digital for a decade, but conceded that the company will collect less money per unit from digital sales. The company added the move would allow it to save money on printing and distribution costs.

I have been a slow, but generally pleased user of electronic books (stanza, kindle and open source) on my iphone. It is time to transition and save money….
Matthew Garrahan & Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson have more:

“But our students still learn from instructional materials in formats made possible by Gutenberg’s printing press. It’s nonsensical – and expensive – to look to traditional hard-bound books when information is so readily available in electronic form.”
However, with California facing a record $24bn budget deficit the state could struggle with high start-up costs – particularly as Mr Schwarzenegger has pledged to make digital text books available to each of the state’s 2m students.
“The main practicality is that until students have full and equal access to computers, this would be very difficult to phase in,” wrote Citigroup analysts in a research note.
The state is one of the biggest purchasers of school textbooks in the world so the transition to digital learning could have big implications for publishers, such as Pearson, owner of the Financial Times.

Eight Tuition-Free Colleges

Scott Allen:

During difficult economic times, the cost of higher education leaves many students wondering if they can afford to go to college. For those who want to avoid being saddled with huge loans, the U.S. government offers one of the best deals around: Enroll at one of the five service academies tuition-free and receive free room and board. (And you thought the Grand Slam promotion at Denny’s was cool.) But if military service isn’t for you, here are eight other schools that offer tuition-free educations:
1. College of the Ozarks
Several schools share the “Linebacker U” and “Quarterback U” monikers in reference to the NFL talent that their college football programs produce, but the only “Hard Work U” is located in Point Lookout, Missouri. In 1973, a Wall Street Journal reporter bestowed that title on the College of the Ozarks, where students pay no tuition and work at least 15 hours a week at a campus work station. Jobs are taken seriously at the school of 1,400; students are graded on their work performance in addition to their academics.
History: In 1906, Presbyterian missionary James Forsythe helped open the School of the Ozarks to provide a Christian high school education to children in the Ozarks region, which spans parts of Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. The school added a two-year junior college 50 years later and completed its transition to a four-year college program in 1965. The school was renamed College of the Ozarks in 1990 and has established itself as one of the top liberal arts colleges in the Midwest.

LEAP scores improve in New Orleans for third straight year

Sarah Carr:

New Orleans test scores jumped this year across most grade levels and school types, with both charter and traditional schools celebrating gains.
The boost in scores, the third consecutive year of improvement, helped narrow a still-sizable gap in student achievement between the city and the rest of Louisiana.
“In some cases, the gap is closing dramatically, ” said Recovery School District Superintendent Paul Vallas.
Vallas’ district includes 33 traditional and 33 charter schools. Overall, both types of schools saw some growth, although the charters still outperformed the noncharters, echoing last year’s scores. The directly run RSD schools, however, must accept students enrolling throughout the year, while charters can cap their enrollment, giving them a more stable student population.

Madison School Board OK’s 1 More Year of Infinite Campus, with More Oversite

Monday evening’s Madison School Board meeting included approval of another year of Infinite Campus along with (and this is quite important) a motion requiring that within six months, administration document use of IC and identify barriers to use where they exist, with the purpose of achieving 100% implementation by the end of 2012 or sooner.
Successful implementation of this student and parent information portal across all schools and teachers should be job one before any additional initiatives are attempted.

The Examined Working Life

Lauren Mechling:

The Swiss essayist Alain de Botton has cultivated a following by unpacking the psychological and philosophical underpinnings of our everyday lives.
His 1997 breakout book “How Proust Can Change Your Life” imparted practical lessons to be found in Marcel Proust’s classic “In Search of Lost Time.”
He has also written books and hosted television programs on travel, love, and architecture. In his latest book, “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work,” he examines of the activity we spend most of our waking hours doing: our jobs.
To research this project, Mr. de Botton, who lives in London, shadowed members of various professions including an accountant, a rocket scientist, a cookie manufacturer, and an inventor. He answered our questions by email.

Is AP for All a Formula for Failure

Jay Matthews:

I spend much time with aggressive Advanced Placement teachers. They tell me, quite often, that students must be stretched beyond their assumed capabilities. Whenever I try to pass on this advice, however, I become a target for ridicule and disbelief from readers.
Here comes more of that stuff. Newsweek unveils this week my annual rankings of America’s Top High Schools, with a new twist that skeptics will find even less congenial.
The latest list, to appear on newsweek.com, will include about 1,500 schools that have reached a high standard of participation on college-level AP, International Baccalaureate or Cambridge tests. The bad news is they represent less than 6 percent of U.S. public high schools. The good news is that 73 percent of Washington area schools are on the list. The interesting news is that some of those schools have begun to require AP courses and tests for all students, even those who struggle in class.

State law, attitudes slow charter school movement in Iowa

Staci Hupp:

The nation’s 4,500 charter schools, free to bend tradition in the name of innovation, are credited with some of the biggest leaps in education reform.
Waiting lists are getting longer. Enrollment has doubled. President Barack Obama wants more of the taxpayer-supported alternative schools as a way to restore America’s worldwide education standing.
But in Iowa, charter schools have drawn attention for what’s missing. The movement never took off, despite a $4.2 million infusion of federal money and a special law.
Of 10 schools that opened in the past five years, two have dropped their charters. Eight schools are left. Some resemble their traditional public school counterparts, despite their license to break the mold.

Falling flat-screen TVs a growing threat for kids

Alex Johnson:

Samara Brinkley dozed off just for a moment as she was watching cartoons on TV with her 4-year-old daughter.
Then “I heard the boom, and I woke up and I [saw] my child laying on the floor, and I [saw] a pool of blood coming out in the back of her head,” said Brinkley, 26, of Jacksonville, Fla.
Dymounique Wilson, one of Brinkley’s two daughters, died last Wednesday when the family’s 27-inch television fell over on her.
Nearly 17,000 children were rushed to emergency rooms in 2007, the last year for which complete figures were available, after heavy or unstable furniture fell over on them, a new study reported this month. The study, published in the journal Clinical Pediatrics by researchers at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, found that the such injuries had risen 41 percent since 1990.

History of US Children’s Policy-1900 to present

Andrew Yarrow:

uring the last century–since the Progressive Era and the first White House Conference on Children in 1909–the federal government has vastly expanded its role in promoting the welfare of America’s children and youth. While families remain the bulwark for successful child development, and states, localities, and a host of private entities provide services to infants, children, youth, and their families, the federal government has long supported and provided services ranging from health care to education and enforces a wide range of laws and regulations to protect and enhance the well-being and rights of Americans under age 21.3
This essay offers a brief survey of the development of federal policies affecting children and families from the early 20th century to the early 21st century. The focus is on federal legislation and important federal court decisions; state policy developments largely are excluded.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: After the Crisis: Macro Imbalance, Credibility and Reserve-Currency

Dr. André Lara Resende:

High rates of growth, based on the increase in consumption of the mature economies of first-world countries, cannot be sustained for a prolonged period. First-world countries have low or zero demographic growth, an inverted demographic pyramid and already very high standards of living. The maintenance of a high rate of consumption growth depends, both on the creation of new consumption needs and on the permanent expansion of credit to families with ever higher levels of debt. The rich central countries consume, financed by ever higher levels of debt, in order to satisfy ever more artificial needs, with products made in China, which controls its labor costs and buys raw materials from emerging countries. No need of a profound analysis to conclude that in the long run this model is unsustainable.
There are two currents of interpretation of the present crisis. The first emphasizes a deficiency of the regulatory framework. It argues that it was such deficiency that ultimately led to the excess of leverage in the financial system. The explosion of ingenuity that followed the development of contingent contracts, the so called “derivatives”, and the securitization of credits transformed the financial system from a relationship oriented system into a market transaction oriented system. It should have been more and better regulated in order to avoid the resulting excesses. The second current emphasizes the presence of large international macroeconomic imbalances. Obviously both interpretations are at least partially correct, but they are above all complementary. The macroeconomic imbalance would not have been so deep and persistent without the extraordinary development of the financial market. Indebtedness and leverage would not have reached such extremes in the world without the international macroeconomic imbalance. To accept that both interpretations are complementary does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that to redesign the regulatory framework is as important as to find a way to reverse the international macroeconomic imbalance. If promoted in a hurry and under the emotional impact provoked by the need to inject public money to limit the damage of recent excesses, a new regulatory framework carries the risk of being too repressive, geared to avoid errors of the past and not necessarily able to cope with the challenges of the future. It is easier to restrict and to prohibit than to adapt the regulatory framework to the impending challenges.[2] The design of a new financial regulatory framework, as important as it is, at this present moment, would not be able either to unlock the financial system, or to help the recovery of the world economy. The central question today is how to give a new dynamism to the world economy based on factors different from those that lead to the imbalances or the last decades. Which would be the institutional framework capable to guarantee a sustainable dynamism to the world economy without resuming and deepening the imbalances of the last decade?

Related: Top Chinese banker calls for US to issue Yuan debt instruments.

School Spotlight: Decorated student bassoonist stands out in Mount Horeb

Pamela Cotant:

When David Richards tried out instruments during sixth-grade orientation, he was drawn to the bassoon because it was one of the pieces from which he could coax a sound.
He wound up playing the woodwind instrument as a student in Austin, Texas. Now a senior at Mount Horeb High School, Richards is an accomplished musician in a district known for its music.
“The bassoon requires constant vigilance to play cleanly, as David does,” said John Widdicombe, who plays bass with the Piper Road Spring Band and whose daughter played with Richards in high school. “One really must hear David play to appreciate the gentle voice he offers through his instrument.”
Richards has performed in Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestras since eighth grade and started playing in Winds of Wisconsin as a sophomore and the experiences have propelled his interest in the bassoon.

Extensive Cheating found at an Ohio High School

Andrew Welsh-Huggins:

An Ohio school district says it uncovered a cheating scheme so pervasive that it had to cancel graduation ceremonies for its 60 seniors — but will still mail their diplomas.
A senior at Centerburg High School accessed teachers’ computers, found tests, printed them and distributed them to classmates, administrators said.
Graduation was canceled because so many seniors either cheated or knew about the cheating but failed to report it, said officials of the Centerburg School District.
Superintendent Dorothy Holden said the district had to take a stand and let students know that cheating can’t be tolerated.
“I am alarmed that our kids can think that in society it’s OK to cheat, it’s a big prank, it’s OK to turn away and not be a whistle-blower, not come forth,” Holden said.

Related: Cringely on Cyber Warfare.

Strong correlation found between school rankings and parental education

Deanie Wimmer:

State education leaders have come up with their own analysis in response to our KSL Schools high school rankings. In April, KSL unveiled a comprehensive database on Utah high schools. The state’s findings pertain to every parent.
Our KSL Schools research project ranked the top Utah high schools as Park City, Davis, Skyline, Viewmont, Lone Peak and Timpview. State Education leaders compared our rankings to census data showing communities ranked with the percentage of adults who have college degrees.
Superintendent Larry Shumway said, “I thought there would be some correlation, but what I was surprised to see was almost perfect correlation.”
The State Office of Education found Park City had the most college educated adults, with 52 percent. The communities that follow virtually mirror our list.

Male lecturers pass the test

Siu Sai-wo:

City University president Way Kuo came from a science background, but has a keen interest in educational work. When he was in the United States, he spent a lot of time on educational research despite his busy school administrative duties.
Professor Kuo recently published Clarifying Some Myths of Teaching and Research (Clusty), which he jointly penned with education psychologist Mark E Troy, detailing the results of a study on 10,000 students and 400 teachers.
The study explores the relationship between research work and quality of teaching, and explodes – or confirms – certain myths within education circles, as the book title suggests.
Kuo was invited by the Hong Kong University Graduates Association to give a speech on his new book, and many interesting education- related issues were raised during the talk.
One of the questions concerned whether scholars who engage in research work perform worse in teaching, and whether class size affects teaching performance.

Five Ways to Fix America’s Schools

Harold Levy:

AMERICAN education was once the best in the world. But today, our private and public universities are losing their competitive edge to foreign institutions, they are losing the advertising wars to for-profit colleges and they are losing control over their own admissions because of an ill-conceived ranking system. With the recession causing big state budget cuts, the situation in higher education has turned critical. Here are a few radical ideas to improve matters.
Raise the age of compulsory education. Twenty-six states require children to attend school until age 16, the rest until 17 or 18, but we should ensure that all children stay in school until age 19. Simply completing high school no longer provides students with an education sufficient for them to compete in the 21st-century economy. So every child should receive a year of post-secondary education.
The benefits of an extra year of schooling are beyond question: high school graduates can earn more than dropouts, have better health, more stable lives and a longer life expectancy. College graduates do even better. Just as we are moving toward a longer school day (where is it written that learning should end at 3 p.m.?) and a longer school year (does anyone really believe pupils need a three-month summer vacation?), so we should move to a longer school career.

Coaches struggle to find balance between work and family

Tom Wyrich:

Keith Hennig has a 3-year-old boy named Trevor and a 1-year-old named Brady. He wants to watch them grow up. Not in the brief moments between school and basketball practice. Not in the late-night hours when he would get home from a game or an open gym.
“I hate it during the winter season because I leave when it’s dark out, and when I come home it’s dark out,” Hennig says. “It’s almost depressing.”
Long before he led the Kentwood High girls basketball team to the state championship in March, Hennig, only 32, had decided that it would be his last season. But Hennig discovered that, as with any addiction, it’s one thing to decide to quit. It’s quite another to go through with it.
For two weeks after the championship game, he walked past the state championship trophy every day and saw his girls in the halls at Kentwood, where he is a history teacher. He remembered all those moments that made the late nights and early mornings worth it. He was going through withdrawal.

Steamboat Springs School Board Settles Open Meeting Lawsuit with Newspaper

Jack Weinstein:

The Steamboat Springs School Board formally accepted a lawsuit settlement offer from the Pilot & Today on Monday.
The settlement was tentatively approved by board members last month on the heels of a March ruling by the Colorado Court of Appeals that the previous School Board violated the state’s Open Meetings Law by not properly announcing the intention of its executive session at a Jan. 8, 2007, meeting. As a result of the ruling and settlement offer, the district will pay $50,000 of the newspaper’s attorney fees and release the transcripts from the illegal meeting.
The motion to accept the settlement offer was approved 4-1 on Monday, with a couple of board members expressing satisfaction that the lawsuit is now behind them. Board member John DeVincentis was the only dissenting vote, but he wasn’t the only one displeased with the outcome.

Peanut Butter Politics & The Widget Effect

Jonathan Alter:

“education is the dullest of subjects,” Jacques Barzun wrote in the very first sentence of his astonishingly fresh 1945 classic, Teacher in America. Barzun de- spised the idea of “professional educators” who focus on “methods” instead of subject matter. He loved teachers, but knew they “are born, not made,” and that most teachers’ colleges teach the wrong stuff.
Cut to 2009, when Barack Obama thinks education is the most exciting of subjects. Even so, Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, get Barzun. They understand that the key to fixing education is better teaching, and the key to better teaching is figuring out who can teach and who can’t.
Just as Obama has leverage over the auto industry to impose tough fuel–economy standards, he now has at least some leverage over the education industry to impose teacher-effectiveness standards. The question is whether he will be able to use it, or will he get swallowed by what’s known as the Blob, the collection of educrats and politicians who claim to support reform but remain fiercely committed to the status quo.
Teacher effectiveness-say it three times. Last week a group called the New Teacher Project released a report titled “The Widget Effect” that argues that teachers are viewed as indistinguishable widgets-states and districts are “indifferent to variations in teacher performance”-and notes that more than 99 percent of teachers are rated satisfactory. The whole country is like Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegon, except all the teachers are above average, too.

Related: teacher hiring criteria in Madison.

The Numbers Guy: Statistics Used and Abused

Carl Bialik via a kind reader’s email:

Even when stats are reliable, they may not tell the whole picture. Aldritt pointed to the example of testing results, which may indicate more about success in teaching to a test than in overall education.
The irony of the poor survey results is that, at least according to Mr. Aldritt and independent statisticians, U.K. stats are generally reliable. He says the main problem comes in the beginning and end of the process — “deciding which statistics should be published, and explaining how they should be used.”
However, the authority will have to reserve judgment until it begins issuing its assessments, in the next month or so. And recent statistical snafus elsewhere illustrate that getting the basic numbers right isn’t always easy. A government audit of South Korean statistics found that farms with thousands of chickens were reported as lacking the birds, and that unclaimed dead bodies weren’t being included in death counts. A spokesman for the National Statistics Office said the office is gathering relevant documents to determine how to punish those at fault.

US Federal Government Stimulus / Splurge Funds and Wisconsin School District Budgets

Jason Stein:

The possible cuts come on top of other proposed changes to school finance, including ending an effective 3.8 percent cap on teacher pay and benefits in July 2010.
“I think you can argue that this is the worst state budget for public schools in a generation,” said Todd Berry, president of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance, who said a few districts may have to consider closing.
UW-Madison economist Andy Reschovsky said the Madison School District could see a net cut in aid of $4.1 million, or 4.6 percent, possibly forcing program cuts, teacher layoffs and big increases in property taxes. His analysis, which is less precise when looking at any single district, suggests the falling aid could set up Madison schools to raise property taxes by up to 7 percent.
Stimulus math
Over the next two years, the state would cut direct aid to schools by nearly $300 million under a budget proposal that still must be approved by the Assembly and Senate and signed by Doyle. Over that period, the federal government is expected to pump $350 million in stimulus money directly into schools through two main streams. The money would mainly have to be used to help poor and special education students.
Doyle’s budget director, Dave Schmiedicke, noted the budget uses some additional stimulus money and $55 million in state money not included in Reschovsky’s analysis to offset part of the increase in property taxes.

Related: Wisconsin K-12 Tax and Spending Growth: 1988-2007

Research suggests children can recover from autism

Lindsey Tanner:

Leo Lytel was diagnosed with autism as a toddler. But by age 9 he had overcome the disorder.
His progress is part of a growing body of research that suggests at least 10 percent of children with autism can “recover” from it — most of them after undergoing years of intensive behavioral therapy.
Skeptics question the phenomenon, but University of Connecticut psychology professor Deborah Fein is among those convinced it’s real.
She presented research this week at an autism conference in Chicago that included 20 children who, according to rigorous analysis, got a correct diagnosis but years later were no longer considered autistic.
Among them was Leo, a boy in Washington, D.C., who once made no eye contact, who echoed words said to him and often spun around in circles — all classic autism symptoms. Now he is an articulate, social third-grader. His mother, Jayne Lytel, says his teachers call Leo a leader.
The study, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, involves children ages 9 to 18.
Autism researcher Geraldine Dawson, chief science officer of the advocacy group Autism Speaks, called Fein’s research a breakthrough.

Illinois joins school march toward national standards, test

Tara Malone:

Illinois has joined a growing list of states that favor common learning guidelines for math and English, a movement that could lead to national testing and what supporters say is a better way for teachers and parents to gauge whether students are improving and measuring up on a nationwide level.
With a deadline for signing onto the idea Wednesday, officials hope to move quickly and have set December as a target for mapping out grade-by-grade standards from kindergarten through senior year.
The initiative would represent a dramatic departure from the past, by ending the current patchwork of state-set expectations and exams that vary widely in rigor. It also could save millions of dollars in redundant tests at a time when governments are struggling with budget deficits.
Backers believe that the groundswell of state support — together with the endorsement of Education Secretary Arne Duncan and a promise of stimulus funds to bankroll the project — may spell success where past efforts have failed.

Students taking advanced placement have tripled in Duval County, but more fail

Topher Sanders, Mary Kelli Palka:

Briana Hudson, a senior at Wolfson High School, took her first Advanced Placement class two years ago and received a B.
She was happy with the boost to her grade-point average. She was excited by the chance to receive college credit by passing the national AP exam. She thought her class had prepared her for it, which was the point.
Except it didn’t. She didn’t pass.
“But if I’m getting B’s in the class, and I’m doing all the work and turning everything in and I answer questions and you say that they’re right,” Hudson, 18, said, “… it’s just kind of like everything that I did was basically a lie.”
Hudson is one of thousands of Duval County Public Schools students who passed AP classes in the past two years but failed to pass the related AP exams, a Times-Union review has shown.
Duval students passed 80 percent of their AP courses last year with a “C” or better. But only 23 percent of the national AP exams, taken near the end of those courses, were passed.
The national exam pass rate for public schools was 56 percent.
The disparity widens depending on the school: Students in the district’s four “A” high schools, whose students are largely white, passed 85 percent of their AP courses and 42 percent of their exams. In the four “F” schools, whose students are largely black or from lower income families, 74 percent of the courses were passed – and only 6 percent of the exams were.

‘Getting to Yes’ Skills Useful at Home Too

Rivers & Barnett:

Though women still do more of the housework and child care, the so-called second shift scenario–in which working women are stuck doing all the work at home too–is less widespread than a decade or so ago.
The fact that men can do the grunt work at home doesn’t mean that they will “naturally” do it though–usually the wife has to exert some leverage. Sometimes that leverage is her earnings; other times it’s her ability to negotiate.
Unfortunately, the fear that abounds now is that the punishing economic climate may eviscerate a positive trend of more decision making by women.
Women Are Often the Deciders
The Pew Research Center conducted a study in 2008 of 1,260 people who were married or living together as couples and found striking equality in decision making in finances, weekend activities and big-ticket purchases.