Mass Insight:

Welcome to our Turnaround Forum, offering a thoughtful and extended look at what’s working, what’s not, and what’s possible in transforming the nation’s lowest-performing schools.
Our issue briefs and blogs will feature commentary, news, research, practical tools, and (we hope) lively discussion from some of the top practitioners and opinion leaders in the country. We’re hoping to provide a platform for many voices — people like us who believe we have a truly unique chance to turn around the country’s worst schools and who want to make sure we’re being bold and bright enough to take advantage of the opportunity.
Issue Briefs
This series of monthly issue briefs focuses on some of the most current and important topics in the turnaround field. Briefs include news from the field, reflections from current state, district, and school turnaround leaders, as well as discussions on policy and promising practices emerging in school turnaround.
Successful Principals Speak Out (324.8 KB)

Erin Richards:

For example, in addition to having to publicly post their graduates’ first-time pass rates on the exams required for licensure starting in the 2013-’14 school year, the programs would also have to annually provide the DPI with a list of their graduates and graduation dates.
DPI, in turn, is required in the legislation to include that data in a statewide student-information system, which could allow the state to track which schools new teachers end up in after graduation.
It could also eventually be connected to the performance of those teachers’ students on state tests.
Teacher certification tests have been scrutinized because it’s hard to adequately assess, in one exam, the multitude of skills necessary to be a good teacher. And there’s little research evidence to suggest that the current crop of exams is a useful tool for doing that.
The current tests are developed by the nonprofit Educational Testing Service or the for-profit education company Pearson, and they typically rely heavily on multiple-choice questions.
Cut scores, or the score required to pass the tests, are often set well below averages.
A 2010 analysis by the National Council for Teacher Quality (reports) found that on average, states had set the bar so low, that even teacher candidates who scored in the 16th percentile would receive their certification.
In Wisconsin, the pass rates of new teachers on the multiple-choice subject tests required for licensure the same every year – 100%. That’s because the state requires a passing grade on the test before an institution can recommend that teacher candidate for a license.
Nobody is currently required to report how many times a teacher candidate might have taken the certification test and failed.
“The testing technology that is widely used today just can’t get at what is really the fundamental question of ‘Can the person actually teach?’ ” said Sharon Robinson of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, which is collaborating with Pearson on the performance assessment.
“We can give a number of different tests about what they know,” she said. “I think the ambition now is to get an assessment that can actually document the candidate’s ability to teach.”

Related: A Capitol Conversation on Wisconsin’s Reading Challenges and 9.27.2011 Wisconsin Read to Lead Task Force Notes

MD Kittle:

While there is no disputing the divisiveness and political bitterness Act 10 has created, the law that redefined collective bargaining in Wisconsin has made a dramatic difference for the state’s financially struggling school districts, according to a report slated for release this week.
But superintendents tell Wisconsin Reporter they worry about the long-lasting emotional scars left by the contentious reform battle.
Wisconsin school districts have realized significant savings either through the implementation of collective bargaining changes or the threat of them, according to an analysis by the Michigan-based Education Action Group Foundation, known as EAG, a nonprofit research organization promoting school spending reform.
The pointed report, titled “The Bad Old Days of Collective Bargaining: Why Act 10 Was Necessary for Wisconsin Public Schools,” devotes plenty of its pages to applauding the collective bargaining reforms led by Republican Gov. Scott Walker, but it backs up the assertions with some telling numbers.

Jason Riley:

The Obama administration is waiving around a new study showing that black school kids are “suspended, expelled, and arrested in school” at higher rates than white kids. According to the report, which looked at 72,000 schools, black students comprise just 18% of those enrolled yet account for 46% of those suspended more than once and 39% of all expulsions.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan said the administration is “not alleging overt discrimination in some or all of these cases,” but that’s certainly what he’s implying when he bleats on about the “fundamental unfairness” of the situation. “The undeniable truth,” said Mr. Duncan in a press call this week, “is that the everyday education experience for too many students of color violates the principle of equity at the heart of the American promise.” Of course, if racial animus toward blacks explains higher black discipline rates, what explains the fact that white kids are disciplined at higher rates than Asian kids? Is the school system anti-white, too?

Neerav Kingsland:

Andre Shleifer, a professor of Economics at Harvard, recently wrote an excellent article: “Seven Things I Learned About Transition from Communism.” In case you don’t know Andre, some consider him to be the most cited economist in the world.
The analysis is interesting throughout – it deviates from both “progressive” and “conservative” talking points on key issues. Take five minutes and read the whole thing.
For those of us Relinquishers who see opportunity in moving public schooling from government-operated to government-regulated and non-profit run, lessons abound. For those skeptical of these types of reforms – lessons also abound. See below for the summary of Andrei’s lessons – laced with my takeaways for improving our educational system:

Wendy Kopp:

When I dropped my kids off at school last week, I had a hard time looking their teachers in the eye. The New York City government had just posted their performance assessments online, and though I’m a strong supporter of teacher accountability and effectiveness, I was baffled and embarrassed by the decision.
So-called value-added rankings–which rank teachers according to the recorded growth in their students’ test scores–are an important indicator of teacher effectiveness, but making them public is counterproductive to helping teachers improve. Doing so doesn’t help teachers feel safe and respected, which is necessary if they are going to provide our kids with the positive energy and environment we all hope for.
The release of the rankings (which follows a similar release last year in Los Angeles) is based on a misconception that “fixing” teachers is the solution to all that ails our education system.

News 5:

Metro Schools director Dr. Jesse Register gave his “State of Metro Schools” address on Thursday.
In the speech Register spoke about issues facing the school system, including the possible expansion of charter schools here in Tennessee. He also highlighted some of the some of the accomplishments the district has made over the past year- as well as the challenges they continue to face.
The past year has been busy for the Metro Schools district. At the beginning of the school year US Education Secretary Arne Duncan challenged Tennessee to become the fastest improving state in the country.
This school year the district hired the Tribal Group to help turn around its lowest performing schools. The England Based consultants are working with more than 30 schools, interviewing staff, parents and students- and making individualized recommendations about how to improve student achievement.

Kate Allt:

The Iowa Department of Education released the dropout rates for the state’s districts from 2010 to 2011.
Reform has been the word when it comes to education in Iowa the past few months, with the governor’s plan to reform the state’s system.
Statewide, the graduating class of 2011 saw a decline of less than one percent in the graduation rate from the previous year.
In Southeast Iowa, rates varied for four-year cohort graduation rates, with over 96 percent of students graduating from the Van Buren School District and just over 86 percent in Fairfield.

Laura Waters:

The New Jersey Education Association, NJ’s primary teacher union, trumpets, “New Jersey’s schools are the best in the nation!”
But a non-profit, Advocates for Children of New Jersey, counters, “an analysis of third graders’ performance on state reading tests from the 2009-2010 school year shows only 42 percent of traditional public school students and 46 percent of charter school students are proficient.”
Which is it? Well, it all depends on your zip code.
NJ’s public school system is characterized by the juxtaposition of great schools nestled next door to chronically failing ones. And, no, I’m not talking about our 31 poorest Abbott districts, our Camdens and Trentons and Asbury Parks.
For an example of this pattern of educational inequity, travel no further than Burlington County. First stop: Willingboro Public Schools, now on its fifth superintendent in six years. The NJ Department of Education ranks districts socio-economically, on a District Factor Group (DFG) scale from A (the poorest) to J (the richest). Willingboro rank is CD: not wealthy by any means, but not an Abbott either.

South County Independent:

t’s not about bullying. It’s not about educational quality. Any time the National Education Association, the commissioner for higher education, local school committees and superintendents talk about each other these days, it’s about one thing: control.
In South Kingstown, the teachers union has launched into an all-out assault on the School Committee in respect to the firing of three special education teachers. Accusing the committee of bullying because it dismissed the nontenured teachers, the union members showed up at a recent School Committee meeting en masse, bearing signs reading “Hatchet Job” and “Stop the Bullies. Speak Up.”
The union has a vested interest in protecting its members. The School Committee wants the ability to dismiss teachers who aren’t working up to par. The issue is who is going to have control over who will teach in the classroom: the union or the School Committee. To call the School Committee or school administrators “bullies” because they exercised their right to dismiss an employee is a stretch. If they used this right to threaten all other teachers – which they can’t do any way, since most teachers are tenured – the administrators and School Committee might then be accused of the B word. But to say that the administration can’t fire a teacher without being accused of bullying is akin to giving every teacher who is hired a lifelong contract.

Michael Medved:

The angry, populist tone of a seemingly endless battle for the GOP presidential nomination could damage the Republican Party in building a long-term connection with the fastest growing group of swing voters: college graduates.
While candidates focus on the white working class as the key battleground in their frantic struggle for advantage within the GOP, it’s actually voters with four-year college degrees who will play the key role in defeating or re-electing Barack Obama.
In 2008, exit polls showed that an unprecedented 44% of all voters held bachelor degrees or higher, compared to just 28% of the electorate in Ronald Reagan’s landmark victory of 1980. The Gipper, however, crushed Jimmy Carter among college grads (52% to 35%) while John McCain lost this segment of the population to Barack Obama (45% to 53%). In other words, the Republican nominee went from a 17-point advantage (in both ’80 and ’84, as it turns out) to an eight-point loss among those who completed college–a crippling swing of 25 full percentage points.

EdSource, via a kind email:

This path-breaking EdSource symposium in collaboration with the California State PTA will look at the impact of the state’s budget deficit and the continuing impact of the Great Recession on schools, and on the ability of children living in economically distressed households to succeed academically.
California’s highly regarded Legislative Analyst Mac Taylor will lead off the discussion with the latest developments on the state budget and its effect on schools.
Leading researchers will identify emerging data showing the impact of the economic crisis (including housing foreclosures and unemployment) on school performance.
A panel of representatives from school districts and nonprofit organizations will describe innovative school and community strategies to help ensure that an entire cohort of students does not fall through the cracks.

Maisie McAdoo:

Teachers reacted with dismay and anger when they returned to school on Monday, Feb. 27, after the release of deeply flawed Teacher Data Reports that ranked them against their colleagues based on student test scores.
“They feel the city has done nothing but try to bash them,” UFT President Michael Mulgrew told reporters in front of PS 321 in Park Slope, where he stopped by to support returning staff. “These reports were never meant to be used this way. The mayor has done a great disservice to school communities, students and teachers.”

Megan Rolland & Randy Ellis

Two accounts that a state investigation found were used as slush funds by the state Education Department over the course of 10 years were closed in 2011 with about $780 remaining, after holding more than $90,000 a year earlier, according to Education Department officials.
The investigation was released Wednesday by the state Auditor and Inspector’s Office and detailed how state Education Department officials spent about $2.3 million over the course of 10 years out of two undisclosed funds.
The accounts were used to purchase food and alcohol at annual education conferences hosted under the leadership of former state schools Superintendent Sandy Garrett.
Garrett said the use of the funds was not only legal and appropriate, but saved taxpayers money by soliciting private donations to pay for food and drinks served at the conferences.

MetLife, Dana Markow, Andrea Pieters:

The MetLife Survey of the American Teacher: Teachers, Parents and the Economy (2011) examines the teaching profession and parent-school engagement at a time when there has been a prolonged economic downturn.
The survey explores how teachers, parents and schools are working together to promote student learning and healthy development in the context of reduced budgets, reallocation of resources, and continued attention to improving teaching and learning. These issues are examined from the perspectives of teachers, parents and students.
Teachers are less satisfied with their careers; in the past two years there has been a significant decline in teachers’ satisfaction with their profession. In one of the most dramatic findings of the report, teacher satisfaction has decreased by 15 points since the MetLife Survey of the American Teacher measured job satisfaction two years ago, now reaching the lowest level of job satisfaction seen in the survey series in more than two decades. This decline in teacher satisfaction is coupled with large increases in the number of teachers who indicate that they are likely to leave teaching for another occupation and in the number who do not feel their jobs are secure.
Several factors distinguish teachers with high job satisfaction from those with lower satisfaction. Teachers with high job satisfaction are more likely to feel their jobs are secure and say they are treated as a professional by the community. They are also more likely to have adequate opportunities for professional development, time to collaborate with other teachers, more preparation and supports to engage parents effectively, and greater involvement of parents and their schools in coming together to improve the learning and success of students.
Overall, majorities of both parents and teachers say teachers are treated as professionals by the community and that teachers’ health insurance and retirement benefits are fair for the work they do. However, majorities of parents and teachers do not feel that teachers’ salaries are fair for the work they do.

Matthew Lardner:

Previously on JPGB, I wrote about how the world is getting better all the time, with the notable exception of K-12 education. That post included the following chart from Andrew Coulson of the Cato Institute:

So just how did we manage to pull this off? The Digest of Education Statistics illustrates how we managed it on the spending side. First, the number of teachers per pupil expanded substantially. Now I am writing this in my pajamas before having my morning caffeine, so feel free to double-check my numbers from the source.

Stephanie Banchero:

Efforts to revamp public education are increasingly focused on evaluating teachers using student test scores, but school districts nationwide are only beginning to deal with the practical challenges of implementing those changes.
Only an estimated 30% of classroom teachers in the U.S. work in grades or subjects covered by state standardized tests. Currently, most states test students only in math and reading in third through eighth grades and once in high school, as mandated by the federal No Child Left Behind law. Few states test students in other core subjects, such as science and social studies, and for many other subjects there is no testing at all.
Rolling out systemwide tests and devising ways to measure educator effectiveness require additional spending for states and districts, many already low on cash. And some parents and teachers complain that the effort has translated into more testing for children, taking away from classroom learning.

Chester E. Finn:

Writing last about the “war against the Common Core,” I suggested that those English language arts and math standards arrived with four main assets. (In case you’re disinclined to look, they boil down to rigor, voluntariness, portability, and comparability.)
Let me now revisit a fifth potential asset, which is also the main reason that small-government conservatives should favor the Common Core or other high-quality “national standards”: This is the best path toward getting Uncle Sam and heavy-handed state governments to back off from micro-managing how schools are run and to return that authority to communities, individual schools, teachers, and parents.

Associated Press:

A funny thing is happening between President Barack Obama and many Republican governors when it comes to improving America’s schools: They are mostly getting along.
After Obama spoke recently to the nation’s governors, Louisiana GOP Gov. Bobby Jindal publicly praised the administration’s efforts on education, and Virginia Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell said there was a lot of room for “common agreement” on fixing schools. Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam, another Republican, introduced Obama in September at the White House before the president announced that states could be freed from stringent rules under the No Child Left Behind law if they met certain conditions.

Andrew Rotherham:

If your child’s school is lousy, would you want the option to band together with other parents and take it over? That’s the idea behind “parent trigger” legislation that enables parents in low-performing schools to vote to change the governance of their children’s school — and remove teachers and the principal if they want to. Although only four states have enacted such a law (California was the first to do so in 2010), legislators in Florida are debating this week whether it should become the fifth, and similar bills are pending in a dozen states.
But so far parents have yet to make a trigger vote stick. Yesterday, parents in Adelanto, Calif., resubmitted a petition to take over a school there after their first petition was rejected by the school board following a frantic campaign by the teachers union to dissuade parents from signing. At a school in Compton last year, parents backed away in the face of pressure so intense a Los Angeles court found their First Amendment rights had been violated. In perhaps the most offensive allegation, teachers union activists have apparently told immigrant parents that supporting the trigger campaign could result in their deportation.

Susan Day:

For Susan Curtis, a retired school nurse, art appreciation is not just academic.
She knows that art also has the power to break down cultural barriers and stereotypes, inspire creativity, and foster community. With Africa Connects!, a K-12 art history and service-learning project in Madison, Curtis puts that idea into practice.
Children from Sherman Middle School take notes while viewing African art and beaded works on exhibit at the Chazen Museum of Art. The group is participating in a grant-funded project — called “Africa Connects!” — led by volunteer coordinator Susan Curtis (background at right) and offered through the Madison Metropolitan School District.
With help from the Chazen Museum of Art and others in the community, Curtis worked to forge a partnership between local schools that opened the door for high school and middle school students to learn more about African art.

Joey Garrison:

Duplicating a Metro strategy, the Tennessee Department of Education is challenging the three school districts with the state’s lowest-performing schools to create so-called “offices of innovation” to find creative ways to spur turnarounds.
The plan, including its terminology, is identical to an approach Director of Schools Jesse Register unveiled for Metro in July when he announced the district’s 10 weakest achieving schools would be isolated into a special innovation cluster.
Now, Metro Nashville Public Schools, Memphis City Schools and Hamilton Schools are all in the process of drafting formal plans for innovation zones that require state approval, Tennessee Education Commissioner Kevin Huffman told reporters at an inaugural “brown bag” lunch gathering Thursday.
“Metro Nashville was already going to do this,” Huffman said. “It seemed like an interesting model, so we tried to sketch out some parameters.”
The three districts are required to turn in Office of Innovation proposals by March 31. At stake is $35 million in federal school improvement grants to be spread out among the districts over three years

Terry Dean:

Oak Park Elementary School District 97 will undertake an audit this spring to identify strengths and weaknesses in its curriculum.
The district plans to hire an outside firm, or individual, to conduct the audit, which is scheduled to take place between April and June. It comes as D97, and school districts nationwide, prepare to implement new state-led standards on improving students’ learning skills.
Lisa Schwartz, D97’s curriculum coordinator, said results from the audit should be complete by late summer or early fall. The district is currently looking at potential firms, she said. Administrators talked with teachers last fall about pursuing an audit this spring. Once completed and with results in hand, Schwartz said the district will look at implementing immediate and long-term changes to the district’s curriculum.

Matthew DiCarlo:

Anyone who wants to start a charter school must of course receive permission, and there are laws and policies governing how such permission is granted. In some states, multiple entities (mostly districts) serve as charter authorizers, whereas in others, there is only one or very few. For example, in California there are almost 300 entities that can authorize schools, almost all of them school districts. In contrast, in Arizona, a state board makes all the decisions.
The conventional wisdom among many charter advocates is that the performance of charter schools depends a great deal on the “quality” of authorization policies – how those who grant (or don’t renew) charters make their decisions. This is often the response when supporters are confronted with the fact that charter results are varied but tend to be, on average, no better or worse than those of regular public schools. They argue that some authorization policies are better than others, i.e., bad processes allow some poorly-designed schools start, while failing to close others.
This argument makes sense on the surface, but there seems to be scant evidence on whether and how authorization policies influence charter performance. From that perspective, the authorizer argument might seem a bit like tautology – i.e., there are bad schools because authorizers allow bad schools to open, and fail to close them. As I am not particularly well-versed in this area, I thought I would look into this a little bit.

National Council on Teacher Quality:

A review of coursework on K-12 assessment from a sample of teacher preparation programs
SUMMARY
Over the past several decades, federal and state governments, school districts and education leaders have invested significant resources to develop assessments and data systems to track student performance.Yet little attention has been paid to the importance of building the capacity of teachers in assessment so that they are prepared to use data on student learning to inform and improve instruction. As part of our National Review of Teacher Preparation Programs, the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) is examining the extent to which teacher preparation programs train teachers to understand assessment data and use that data to make informed instructional adjustments. Our preliminary findings are cause for concern: At best, teacher preparation programs in this preliminary sample are providing limited training to candidates in the field of assessment and data use. As a result, schools end up employing teachers who lack the training necessary to make use of information increasingly at hand.

Mike Ford

I find discussions of the per-pupil funding level of different types of Milwaukee schools usually turns into a debate on how to make a true apples-to-apples comparison of per-pupil support for the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) and the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP). While basic differences in MPS and MPCP schools and their cost-drivers make any comparison imperfect, the following is what you might call a green apples to red apples comparison.
DISCLAIMER: if you not interested in school funding, prepare to be bored.
Per-pupil support for MPS
Note I am not trying to calculate per-pupil education funding or suggest that this is the amount of money that actually reaches a school or classroom; it is a simple global picture of how much public revenue exists per-pupil in MPS. Below are the relevant numbers for 2012, from MPS documents:
…….
Though not perfect, I think $13,063 (MPS) and $7,126 (MPCP) are reasonably comparative per-pupil public support numbers for MPS and the MPCP.

Laurie Rogers, via a kind email

Perched up there the tears of others are never upon our own cheek.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The White Witch
“I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
Republicans, Democrats, progressives, communists, anarchists, elitists, corporatists and fascists are finally working together – in a multi-partisan effort to look the same. Having outlawed logic several sessions ago, Washington legislators are fixing education by breaking it some more.

• HB 2799 would pay the deep thinkers in the colleges of education to “partner” with K-12 on “innovation,” thus sending all of us farther into financial, academic and social ruin.
• HB 2337 would pay the geniuses at the state education agency to write online curricula in alignment with the unfunded, unproved, arguably illegal, obscenely expensive de facto federal mandate called the Common Core. Legislators who had promised to help fight off the Common Core defended their support of HB 2337 by saying, “Shut up. Don’t be so negative.”
• HB 2586 would pay for mandated standardized testing of kindergartners, getting them started early with government brow-beating and low self-esteem. Legislators explained the idea: “Why should kindergartners feel good about themselves? Nobody else gets to do it.”
• HB 2533 was affectionately dubbed “Fund the Education Mob First.” Legislators defended their support of this bill by refusing to discuss it.

School districts already suffering from a phenomenal growth in their operating and capital projects budgets over ten years have been forced to consider doing things properly and efficiently. Desperate, they begged for help, and lawmakers came to their aid by voting to eliminate everything from school buildings other than administrative staff. As a matter of efficiency, the measures became law before they were written.
As a result of these measures, school district buildings in Washington State soon will have nothing in them but administrators, support staff and “Vote Yes for Kids!” signs. Forums were held around the state to pretend to gather feedback. In Spokane, administrators shrugged and said, “So what? We’ve already begun to do that. We’ve been trying to get rid of the little buggers for decades.”
As a result of these measures, school district buildings in Washington State soon will have nothing in them but administrators, support staff and “Vote Yes for Kids!” signs. Forums were held around the state to pretend to gather feedback. In Spokane, administrators shrugged and said, “So what? We’ve already begun to do that. We’ve been trying to get rid of the little buggers for decades.”

The New York Times:

Distressing new federal data on the disciplinary treatment of black students adds urgency to investigations into the treatment of minority children in a dozen school districts around the country by the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Education. The agency, which is negotiating policies with some of these districts, needs to push for procedures that keep children in school.
The new 2009-10 federal data, drawn from more than 72,000 schools, serving about 85 percent of the nation’s students, covers a range of issues, including student discipline and retention.
Black students made up only 18 percent of those in the sample but 35 percent of those suspended one time and 39 percent of all expulsions. Blacks, in general, are three-and-a-half times as likely to be suspended or expelled than their white peers, and more than 70 percent of the students who were involved in arrests or referred to law enforcement agencies were black or Hispanic.

Sam Sperry, Kirsten Vital, Cristina Sepe, Paul Hill, via a kind Deb Britt email:

This working paper series examines the politics of portfolio school district reform, with a primary focus on the issues surrounding high school closures. The authors take an in-depth look at how school closure policies have played out in four urban districts–New York City, Chicago, Denver, and Oakland–and offer a political assessment of what worked or failed and why. The political analyses, case studies, cross-district comparisons, and analysis frameworks may help education leaders anticipate and better address the challenges of closing schools within their own communities.

New York State.

Jay Matthews:

Gifted education rarely draws headlines. Gifted classes are most common in affluent suburbs with many academically oriented families. The kids do well. The parents are happy. No news there.
Gifted education receives little notice in low-income urban school districts because it often doesn’t exist there. Big-city schools have more pressing issues than serving children with unusual intellectual talent. Such districts might designate some students as gifted but rarely do much with them.
That is going to change in D.C. public schools when the new academic year begins. D.C. officials are installing an unusual method of gifted education for all in two very different neighborhood middle schools, Kelly Miller and Hardy. At the same time, a new charter school called BASIS D.C. is opening, with the most academically challenging program ever seen in this region.

Jay Matthews:

Last week, I examined the nation’s move toward Common Core learning standards from the lofty perspective of scholars and policymakers. Let’s see what it looks like to a smart but confused high school English teacher in San Leandro, Calif.
Jerry Heverly has been teaching for 10 years. He has an intense interest in what the new standards might do for his mostly minority students in the East Bay community. “I really want to find a way to get involved in the political process around these changes,” he said, “but I don’t quite know how to do it.”
So he showed up at a February conference in San Jose sponsored by his union, the California Teachers Association. Marlene Fong and Vernon Gettone, association experts, promised “A Look at the New California State Standards and a New Generation of State Assessments.”
Heverly appreciated their behind-the-scenes revelations from Sacramento. But the session materials jarred him. They said that the Common Core standards, agreed to by the District and 45 states (including California and Maryland, but not Virginia), would be “internationally benchmarked so that all students are prepared to succeed in our global economy and society.”

Cory Doctorow:

The ACLU has brought suit against the Minnewaska (Minnesota) Area Schools and Pope County over invasions of students’ privacy relating to a pair of incidents. In the first incident, a 12-year-old student was disciplined for complaining on Facebook that she “hated” a hall monitor who was “mean” (the school characterized this as “bullying”). In the second instance, a sheriff’s deputy and school administrators required the student to turn over her Facebook password after her boyfriend’s mother complained that the student and her boyfriend had been talking about sex on the social network.
In both instances, the student used her own, off-school computer to make the contentious remarks, after school hours.

Marc Parry:

Higher education’s spin on the Silicon Valley garage. That was the vision laid out in September, when the Georgia Institute of Technology announced a new lab for disruptive ideas, the Center for 21st Century Universities. During a visit to Atlanta last week, I checked in to see how things were going, sitting down with Richard A. DeMillo, the center’s director and Georgia Tech’s former dean of computing, and Paul M.A. Baker, the center’s associate director. We talked about challenges and opportunities facing colleges at a time of economic pain and technological change–among them the chance that many universities might follow Borders Bookstores into oblivion.
Q. You recently wrote that universities are “bystanders” at the revolution happening around them, even as they think they’re at the center of it. How so?
Mr. DeMillo: It’s the same idea as the news industry. Local newspapers survived most of the last century on profits from classified ads. And what happened? Craigslist drove profits out of classified ads for local newspapers. If you think that it’s all revolving around you, and you’re going to be able to impose your value system on this train that’s leaving the station, that’s going to lead you to one set of decisions. Think of Carnegie Mellon, with its “Four Courses, Millions of Users” idea [which became the Open Learning Initiative], or Yale with the humanities courses, thinking that what the market really wants is universal access to these four courses at the highest quality. And really what the market is doing is something completely different. The higher-education market is reinventing what a university is, what a course is, what a student is, what the value is. I don’t know why anyone would think that the online revolution is about reproducing the classroom experience.

Caralee Adams:

The College Board is piloting two new Advanced Placement courses designed to focus on research skills that admissions counselors say are too often missing in high school graduates.
The new program for juniors and seniors, developed in collaboration with Cambridge International Examinations, will be tested over three years in 15 to 18 high schools starting this fall, the College Board announced today.
The AP/Cambridge Interdisciplinary Investigations and Critical Reasoning Seminar will be offered in 11th grade. Students will work in teams to research and write topics of global relevance. Each school can choose its own topic and pair different disciplines, such as history and English.
The AP/Cambridge Capstone Research Project taken in 12th grade involves writing a 4,500 to 5,000-word paper that will be evaluated on the students’ ability to design, plan, and manage a research project, analyze information, and communicate their findings.

The Concord Review.

UW-Madison Ed School Dean Julie Underwood:

Public education currently stands under twin towers of threat — de-funding and privatization. This is consistent with a conservative agenda to eliminate many public programs — including public education.
In Wisconsin, school districts have been under strict limits on their revenues and spending since 1993. These limits have not kept pace with the natural increases in the costs of everyday things like supplies, energy and fuel. So every year, local school board members and administrators have had to cut their budgets to comply with spending limits. Throughout these years, school boards and administrators have done an admirable job of managing these annual cuts, but taken together, reductions in programs and staff have had a significant and very negative impact on our schools and the education they can provide to children.
Unfortunately this year, these same districts have received the largest single budget cut in Wisconsin history. For example, high poverty aid was cut by 10 percent during a time when poverty in children has increased in Wisconsin. As a result, schools are cutting programs and staff. According to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction data, the cuts in 2012 are greater than the two previous years combined. These cuts will be compounded when next year’s cuts come due.

Related:

• WEAC (Wisconsin Teacher’s Union): $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
  

  How much do election-year firewalls cost to build? For the state’s largest teachers union, $1.57 million.

  That’s how much the Wisconsin Education Association Council said last week it will spend trying to make sure four Democratic state senators are re-elected – enough, WEAC hopes, to keep a Democratic majority in the 33-member state body.

• Georgia, Wisconsin Education Schools Back Out of NCTQ Review
• Grade Inflation for Education Majors and Low Standards for Teachers When Everyone Makes the Grade
• When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
• Mike Ford:
  

  have always been irritated by this line of reasoning, is it really that far-fetched that those who support school choice actually care about education? And who stands to gain if public education is destroyed?
  One longstanding criticism of voucher programs is they are part of a plot to allow private entities to profit off of K-12 education. If true, there should be a profit seeking school sector pushing vouchers for their own benefit. But is there one in Milwaukee?
  To get at this question I examined the non-profit status of private schools in Milwaukee’s voucher program. First, I put the Archdiocesan, WELS, and Missouri Synod schools tied to parishes in the non-profit column. Second, I cross-referenced the names and addresses of the non-Catholic and non-Lutheran schools in the choice program against a database of Wisconsin non-profit corporations I obtained from the Wisconsin Department of Financial Institutions.

WIBA Outreach, via a kind Laura DeRoche-Perez email: Hour 1 [33mb mp3], Hour 2 [36mb mp3].
Notes & Links:
Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad’s $105,600,000 (over 5 years) plan to address the achievement gap.
Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school, here.

The Economist:

hese efforts thus represent an attempt to seize from Democrats one of their signature issues, public education. The states with the best schools, such as Massachusetts, still tend to be Democratic, with relatively high taxes and school spending. And some Democratic places, such as the District of Columbia and New York, have made aggressive attempts at reform. But voters increasingly see Democrats as beholden to teachers’ unions and the status quo, says Eric Hanushek, an education expert at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. The Republican reformers, by contrast, promise reform without higher taxes, in part by confronting the unions.
This is why they look to Mr Bush. What he proved in Florida, claims Jaryn Emhof, his spokesman at the education foundation he now runs, is that “it’s not about how much you’re spending, but how you’re spending, how you’re teaching.” Although school spending did rise slightly under Mr Bush, Florida still spends very little per pupil compared with other states. With a Republican legislature, Mr Bush instead made Florida the only state to adopt an entire bundle of reforms simultaneously, in the teeth of the teachers’ unions.
First Florida started grading its schools from A to F, based on the proficiency and progress of pupils in annual reading, writing, maths and science tests. The state gives extra money to schools that get an A or improve their grade, and children at schools that get two F grades in four years are allowed to transfer to better schools. Second, Florida stopped letting third-grade pupils who could barely read go on to fourth grade (a practice, common all over America, called “social promotion”).

Excellence in Education explains Florida’s reading reforms and compares Florida’s NAEP progress with Wisconsin’s at the July 29th (2012) Read to Lead task force meeting.
Florida, along with Alabama, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Indiana, Massachusetts, Minnesota and North Carolina took the TIMSS global exam in 2011. Wisconsin, did not.

Jay Matthews:

The number of high school students taking AP, IB, Advanced International Certificate of Education and local college courses has been rising. College admissions officers feel those courses prepare students better than regular high school courses for higher education. They tell applicants if their high school has such courses, they should take them. The admissions people add that if your school only offers five AP courses, they don’t expect you to have as many on your transcript as a student at a school that offers 25. But you weaken your case if your AP course taking is not in step with classmates applying to your favorite college.
Jodi Siegel, a College Bound educational consultant in Potomac, said if a student’s classmates “take an average of 6 or 7 APs and this student has taken 3 or 4, in all likelihood that student’s level or rigor will appear less impressive.” This is clear, she said, from admission decisions at schools like the University of Maryland.
The Washington area and other affluent regions have many public and private high schools with two dozen or more AP or IB courses. This is hard on students proficient in only a few of subjects available.

Donna St. George:

Two boys are fighting in a Calvert County middle school. A crowd of students laugh and jeer until a teacher arrives to break it up. Later discipline is meted out.
But the fight is not nearly over.
A video goes up on YouTube — 32 seconds of personal humiliation for the boy who is taking most of the punches. He has often been bullied in middle school, according to his family, and now is shown being hit in the head and side and placed in a headlock.
There is no apparent serious injury, and the clip is posted as “Weak People Fighting.”
It is uploaded onto Facebook, tweeted, shared and commented on.
“I showed my dad, he bust out laughin,” one girl writes on Facebook at 5:09 pm.

Janet Steffenhagen:

Teachers were planning to distribute leaflets outside B.C. public schools Monday morning at the start of what is likely to be a three-day strike.
Because picketing is not legally permitted in this job action, schools were expected to remain open, with principals, vice-principals and support staff on the job. But almost all districts have cancelled bus services and are urging parents to make other arrangements for their children rather than sending them to school.
“It is not possible for school administrators … to provide appropriate supervision for more than 70,000 students,” Surrey, the province’s largest school district, says in a statement on its website. “Even if just a fraction of the total number of students were to attend, their safety and well-being may be seriously compromised.”
StrongStart Centres and child care programs on school property around the province are not expected to be affected.

Daniel Russell:

I don’t mean to be presumptuous, but maybe the question is better framed like this: “How illiterate are you?”
Technically, to be literate means you can simply read and write (that is, code and decode) in the representation system of your social group. But even that simple definition assumes that there is a shared coding scheme. If you’re a kid in the US in the early 21st century, that’s probably English; but it could also just as well be Spanish or Chinese.
But it also has the sense of having knowledge or being competent in a specific area. You can say, “he’s literate about wine,” “literate about netsuke,” or “literate about the Old Testament.” A quick search reveals a whole host of literacies that are common these days: media literacy, information literacy, financial, bible, multicultural, interactive, news, environmental… on and on.

CBS Boston:

Medway-Ashland’s girls high school hockey team lost their appeal of their playoff loss Friday, after a parent was tossed from the game for aiming a laser pointer into the eyes of their goalie.
The score was tied 1-1 in the third period when the father of a Winthrop player was caught pointing the laser at the Medway-Ashland goalie.

Mike Wiser:

Charter schools, online learning, third-grade retention, teacher seniority and a dozen more topics were part of a two-hour public forum Monday night at the Iowa House.
About 40 of the 70 who signed up to give their views on Iowa education were able to in the two-hour time limit imposed by the House. Speakers included teachers, school administrators, parents, lobbyists, students and even the state’s chief executive
Gov. Terry Branstad was first to take the microphone. Right off the bat, he took on critics of three of the most controversial parts of his education reform package.
He told lawmakers that third-grade retention for poor readers, end-of-course exams for high school seniors, and more frequent and rigorous evaluations for teachers and principals are all needed to put Iowa back on top of school rankings.

Angela Dye:

The issue of violence in our schools is a gateway to explore other problems in society. For individuals who are willing to move beyond the micro discussion of blaming students and think critically about the macro phenomenon of systemic oppression, school violence provides insight into the community hopelessness with which children are left to contend.
Before delving into the social context of violence that is occurring in Milwaukee, let’s first examine the socioeconomic and instructional conditions of student learning at the local and state level:
88% of students enrolled in Milwaukee Public Schools are of color, while only 26% of students enrolled at the state level are of color.
19% of MPS students have a special education classification, while only 14% of students at the state level are classified as special education.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

Public schools have a problem with youth violence because the city has a problem with youth violence. There is no magical solution that will fix this multilayered problem, but one thing is certain: Milwaukee Public Schools cannot fix the problem alone.
While the district can put scanners at the doors of every high school to make sure weapons do not enter the building, it will take a communitywide approach that includes parents, social service agencies, community groups, businesses and mentors to help kids deal with the many problems they face, problems that increase the risk of violence.
Matthew Boswell, principal at Vincent High School, said a collaborative approach will help students succeed and make schools safer. In fact, schools and school districts with the strongest community support are safer and have the best student achievement, he said.

James Altucher:

There’s a weird debate happening out there. Apparently Rick Santorum “accused” Obama of insisting that every child go to college. Other websites have said that Obama has never said this but instead has encouraged every kid to seek a higher education. I don’t care about Obama or Santorum. I don’t care about politics at all. But it’s interesting to me how this issue has again sparked a debate.
Expect lots of lies and cutting and stabbing for the next few months until the election. Santorum clearly lied. Obama lies. Everyone will lie about everyone else. Which is why I hate politics, why I think Congress should be abolished, and why I think Nobody should be voted in as President. (Quick: name the last President that actually improved your life as a direct result of their policies.)
And now suddenly, and sadly, “to go or not to go” to college has become a political issue. Yet another pressure trying to ruin the lives of our children.

Amelia Wedemeyer:

About 20 people attended a 2012 School Board candidate forum, co-sponsored by the Northside Planning Council (NPC) and the East Attendance Area PTO Coalition (EAAPTOC), held at Warner Park Community Recreation Center on March 1.
Community members were introduced to the four candidates running for two available seats on the School Board.
The candidates, who include incumbent, Arlene Silveira, vice president of education and learning at Urban League of Greater Madison, Nichelle Nichols, former Commerce Secretary, Mary Burke, and firefighter, Michael Flores, gave brief introductory statements and then answered questions posed by the NPC and the EAAPTOC.
Nichols will take on Silveira, and Burke and Flores will face each other at the polls on April 3.
One of the first questions of the night referred to the recent achievement gap plan proposed by the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD). Each candidate was asked what they thought the single most important part of the plan was.
Burke mentioned the significance of the broad array of programs designed to affect students of all ages, while her opponent, Flores, likened the plan to his job as a firefighter.

2012 Madison School Board Candidates
Seat 1:

Nichele Nichols
www.nichols4schoolboard.org
email: nnichols4mmsd@gmail.com

Arlene Silveira (incumbent)
www.arleneforschoolboard.com
email: arlene_Silveira@yahoo.com

Seat 2 Candidates:

Mary Burke
www.maryburkeforschoolboard.net
email: maryburkewi@gmail.com

Michael Flores
www.floresforschoolboard.org
email: floresm1977@gmail.com

Arlene Silveira & Michael Flores Madison Teachers, Inc. Candidate Q & A

Madison School Board Member Arlene Silveira

Let me tell you a bit about why I’m running and what issues the Board faces.
Public schools face unprecedented challenges. Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum recently called public school systems “anachronistic.” Walker’s budget contains the biggest cut to education in Wisconsin history.
Here in Madison, the Board of Education faces many significant issues: an upcoming budget with a multi-million dollar deficit; children of color, often living in poverty, who do less well in school and graduate at lower rates and a difficult transition from collective bargaining agreements, which Walker eliminated, to a personnel “handbook” that will define our relationships with teachers and staff.
When our schools face multiple challenges, board members must have the backbone to focus on what is most effective in helping all children learn and achieve. We must prioritize initiatives that provide the biggest bang for our buck. When there are hard choices to be made, we owe it to the children we serve to engage in respectful debate in order to find solutions.
I approach my work on the board from many perspectives: as a parent, businessperson, taxpayer and advocate for public education. I will continue to fight against assaults on public education, whether they are attempts to privatize public education or ones that demonize teachers.

Seat 1 Candidates:
Nichele Nichols
www.nichols4schoolboard.org
email: nnichols4mmsd@gmail.com
Arlene Silveira (incumbent)
www.arleneforschoolboard.com
email: arlene_Silveira@yahoo.com
Seat 2 Candidates:
Mary Burke
www.maryburkeforschoolboard.net
email: maryburkewi@gmail.com
Michael Flores
www.floresforschoolboard.org
email: floresm1977@gmail.com
Arlene Silveira & Michael Flores Madison Teachers, Inc. Candidate Q & A
Several related notes & links:

• Wisconsin State Tax Based K-12 Spending Growth Far Exceeds University Funding

  
  The K-12 lobbying crowd has been far more successful redistributing state tax dollars than the higher education advocates.

• Madison’s 2011-2012 enrollment is 24,861. The 2011-2012 budget (October, 2011 version) spends $369,394,753 resulting in per student spending of $14,858.40
• K-12 Tax & Spending Climate

Kristina Peterson:

When George Washington University adjourns next week, 30 students will be doing 50 pages of assigned monetary policy reading while on their spring break.
The homework wasn’t a deterrent to the students who applied to take BADM 4900, a business course that started Tuesday. Boosting the popularity of the half-semester, 1.5-credit course, “Reflections on the Federal Reserve,” is its headlining guest lecturer: the central bank’s chairman, Ben Bernanke.
Later this month, Mr. Bernanke will become the first sitting Fed chairman to deliver a college lecture series. The move highlights the former professor’s push to make the central bank more transparent and accessible by using his academic bona fides to explain the Fed’s many unconventional actions since the financial crisis.

Mathema Tricks:

These days we have become so much dependent on the mechanical devices that we have almost forgotten how to use our mind. We need calculators (if not computers) to add our shopping bills. Daily life tosses plenty of math problems our way. Of course, normal calculation can get boring. Here’s the secret: Tricks & Shortcuts. Mental calculation comprises arithmetical calculations using only the human brain, with no help from calculators, computers or even pen and paper but easily and quickly.

David Streitfeld:

RICHMOND, Calif. — In a wooden warehouse in this industrial suburb, the 20th century is being stored in case of digital disaster.
Forty-foot shipping containers stacked two by two are stuffed with the most enduring, as well as some of the most forgettable, books of the era. Every week, 20,000 new volumes arrive, many of them donations from libraries and universities thrilled to unload material that has no place in the Internet Age.
Destined for immortality one day last week were “American Indian Policy in the 20th Century,” “All New Crafts for Halloween,” “The Portable Faulkner,” “What to Do When Your Son or Daughter Divorces” and “Temptation’s Kiss,” a romance.

Dan Walters:

So Stockton has suspended payments to its bondholders and is seeking to renegotiate its debts in hopes of averting a formal bankruptcy.
Sound familiar? It’s what Greece, which also is head-over-heels in debt, is doing.
The parallels are uncanny. Stockton and Greece spent heavily to keep money flowing to those with political pull, and borrowed heavily, all in the name of societal improvement.
Stockton wanted to improve its poor municipal image – crime-ridden and corrupt. So it borrowed to build a new sports arena, a baseball park, a hotel and a marina – the latter so over the top that boaters visit just to gawk at its grandiosity – while giving extravagant benefits to its employees.

Kris Sims:

Jessie Sansone and his family are reeling after he was arrested and strip searched by police after his four-year-old daughter drew a picture of a man with a gun in her Kitchener, Ont., kindergarten class.
The 26-year-old father of four said Saturday the sketch was supposed to be him, getting the bad guys and monsters.
The school must have thought differently, as after Nevaeh drew it Wednesday, the school contacted Family and Children’s Services and they called police.

goodmate.co.
A sign of the times, I suppose. Automation in the absence of working processes never works…

Chris Rickert:

Assuming Democrats aren’t able to take over state government early next year and reinstate full-fledged public sector collective bargaining, we’re talking about the replacement of some 400 pages of detailed contract language for five district bargaining units.
Madison teachers union-backed board candidates Arlene Silveira, an incumbent, and Michael Flores have indicated to the union that they would essentially be OK with the handbook becoming the collective bargaining agreements by another name.
Mary Burke, who is running against Flores, and Nichelle Nichols, who is challenging Silveira, have not.
“One of the most important needed changes is the use of student learning as a component of a teacher’s evaluation,” Burke told me, while Nichols predicted that employee evaluations, compensation practices and a longer school day or year are likely to be contentious handbook topics.
Silveira told me she’d like the handbook to allow for more flexible scheduling, possibly including more classroom time.
Whatever the specifics of the final product, though, it’s unlikely to be anything but a fair — if not a better-than-fair — deal for employees. Madison, with its public worker union sympathies, won’t stand for anything less.

Isthmus Take Home Test (Nichelle Nichols & Arlene Silveira):

WHAT QUALIFIES YOU TO BE ON THE MADISON SCHOOL BOARD ? WHAT IS YOUR PERSONAL STAKE IN THE MADISON SCHOOLS?
Nichelle Nichols
Our school board must be a governing body that is effective in setting the direction and priorities of our district. We need to elect board members who are honest about our current realities and who share a fundamental belief that we must make bold changes in order to better educate all students. Our students, families and taxpayers deserve it.
I bring a future-oriented mindset to the table and a commitment to solutions. Our heart-breaking graduation rate for Black and Latino students eloquently testifies that we do not fully understand the dynamics of poor student performance or the educational changes required to remedy it. I am personally and professionally committed to making systemic changes to close the racial achievement gap. It is time for defenders of the status quo to step aside.
I am qualified as a parent, as an engaged community member, and as a professional who has worked the last 15 years in community-based organizations throughout Madison. I bring a critical perspective from the service delivery level focused on equity for those who are most disadvantaged. As a woman of color, a parent of African American sons, and through my work at the Urban League, I am immersed in the realities of our minority students, yet in touch with the experiences of all students and parents. I am informed beyond the constraints of the boardroom.
I have a personal stake in the Madison schools that spans two generations. I am a Madison native who attended Longfellow Elementary, Cherokee Middle, and graduated from West High. I have a B.S. from UW-Madison and a master’s degree in Business Management from Cardinal Stritch University. I am the mother of four African American sons. My eldest graduated from West High School in 2011, which leaves me with three yet to graduate. Based on the 48% graduation rate, the odds are that two of my sons won’t graduate. This is unacceptable.
My experience transcends the experience gained from currently sitting on the board, because where we must go will not rely strictly on what we’ve always known. I welcome the challenge.
Arlene Silveira
Our schools face multiple challenges, and board members must have the backbone to focus on what is most effective in helping all children learn and achieve. We must prioritize initiatives that provide the biggest bang for our buck. When there are hard choices to be made, we owe it to the children we serve to engage in respectful debate in order to find solutions.
That is my record on the school board. My commitment to public education, to Madison’s 27,000 students, to our outstanding teachers and staff, and to staying in the fight for good public schools are the reasons I am running for re-election.
My belief in public education has roots in my personal story. I am the grandchild of immigrants, the daughter of two working class parents, and the mother of a child of color who graduated from the Madison schools. I have a degree in secondary education, biology and chemistry from Springfield College (Massachusetts), and a masters in molecular biology from the University of Connecticut.
I have seen first-hand the advantages public education brings and the equalizing effect public schools have in our society. I have seen first-hand the struggles a child can face in the schools. I am a businesswoman who works at a global scientific company. I know the need for an educated workforce, and I know that good schools strengthen a city because they attract businesses and families.
I am also a taxpayer. The state funding system for public education is not sustainable. We must find a way to better fund our schools, not on the backs of taxpayers. I will continue to advocate for fair funding.
The skills I use on a daily basis as Director of Global Custom Sales at Promega Corporation are also skills I use as a board member — budgeting, communication, evaluation, facilitation, negotiation and project management.
In short, I approach the board’s complex work from many perspectives: parent, businessperson, taxpayer, and advocate for public education. I will continue to fight against assaults on public education and advocate for what is most effective for all the students we serve.

Isthmus Take Home Test (Mary Burke & Michael Flores):

WHAT QUALIFIES YOU TO BE ON THE MADISON SCHOOL BOARD? WHAT IS YOUR PERSONAL STAKE IN THE MADISON SCHOOLS?
Mary Burke
When I began tutoring two brothers on Madison’s south side, I saw how tough it is for children with serious challenges at home to learn and thrive in school. School was a refuge for these boys, and education was the best way for them to build a better future. I have worked with teachers striving every day to meet the needs of each student, to challenge the gifted child and the one just learning English. In the past 13 years, I have mentored five youth, have seen great things in our schools, and opportunities to do better.
I care about our children. My broad experience in education, non-profits, government, finance, and business will make me an effective school board member. After receiving an MBA from Harvard, I was an executive at Trek Bicycle, Secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Commerce under Governor Doyle, board president of the Boys & Girls Club, and co-founder of the AVID/TOPS program. AVID/TOPS is the district’s premier program to address the achievement gap, and has 450 students across all four Madison high schools. For those in the program, grade point averages are 30% higher, school attendance higher, discipline issues down, and 100% of seniors have gone onto college. I’ve served on the boards of United Way, Madison Community Foundation, Evjue Foundation, and Foundation for Madison Public Schools. One current school board member said, “Mary Burke stands out. Mary may be the best-qualified candidate to run for Madison School Board in quite a while.”
Success in school for our children is important to me and to our entire community. Our public schools shape our future neighbors and workforce. Success in school is a leading factor in whether a student is on the path to UW-Madison, Madison College, or the county jail. Nothing is more important and critical to our city’s future than our public schools.
I have been a catalyst for positive change in Madison. On the school board, my focus will be bringing our community together to ensure students learn and thrive — taking smart action for them, for our neighborhoods, for all of Madison.
Michael Flores
I have real world experience. I am part of a minority group and have walked the path that a number of our students are encountering. I have worked since I was 14, and supported myself from the age of 17 on. I have worked as a bank loan officer and small businessman, and know what it means to face budget constraints. My training as a paramedic has made me skilled in high emergency prioritizing and urgency in decision-making — skills that will translate to the work on the school board. As a parent and member of this community, I have a vested interest in education.

Seat 1 Candidates:
Nichele Nichols
www.nichols4schoolboard.org
email: nnichols4mmsd@gmail.com
Arlene Silveira (incumbent)
www.arleneforschoolboard.com
email: arlene_Silveira@yahoo.com
Seat 2 Candidates:
Mary Burke
www.maryburkeforschoolboard.net
email: maryburkewi@gmail.com
Michael Flores
www.floresforschoolboard.org
email: floresm1977@gmail.com
1.25.2012 Madison School Board Candidate DCCPA Event Photos & Audio
Listen to the event via this 77MB mp3 audio file.

Free through 3.31.2012 in epub, pdf and mobi format:

This is a book of passion, media literacy and social justice. Grounded in real-life examples, it points the way for all of us by raising important questions of how we can live on this planet as one human family.

Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:

Mary Burke and Michael Flores are vying to replace Lucy Mathiak on the Madison School Board. Judged by their background, experience and skills and by the extent to which they’re prepared to grapple with the tough issues the Board faces, there is simply no comparison between the two. Mary Burke stands out. Mary may be the best-qualified candidate to run for Madison School Board in quite a while. (She’s far better qualified than I was when I first ran, for whatever that’s worth).
Let’s run through some of the dimensions of experience that can be helpful for School Board service. Involvement with our schools? Check. Mary is the co-founder and co-chair of the AVID/TOPS program, a widely-praised partnership between the school district and Boys and Girls Club that started at East High and is now in all our high schools and spreading to our middle schools. She is a mentor to a sophomore at East and to a foster teen in the district’s program for school-aged parents and she tutors first graders as a Schools of Hope volunteer at Frank Allis School.
Business experience? Check. Mary has started a business, worked for Trek Bicyle, worked as a business consultant and served as Secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Commerce. Board experience? Check. Mary has served on the Boards of the Foundation for Madison Public Schools, the Madison Community Foundation, the United Way, and the Evjue Foundation, and was a long-time president of the Board of the Boys and Girls Club.

Much more on Ed Hughes, here.
Madison School Board Election Notes and Links:
Nichele Nichols
www.nichols4schoolboard.org
email: nnichols4mmsd@gmail.com
Arlene Silveira (incumbent)
www.arleneforschoolboard.com
email: arlene_Silveira@yahoo.com
Seat 2 Candidates:
Mary Burke
www.maryburkeforschoolboard.net
email: maryburkewi@gmail.com
Michael Flores
www.floresforschoolboard.org
email: floresm1977@gmail.com
1.25.2012 Madison School Board Candidate DCCPA Event Photos & Audio
Listen to the event via this 77MB mp3 audio file.
Arlene Silveira & Michael Flores Madison Teachers, Inc. Candidate Q & A
The “status quo” vs. reform battle appears to be underway. Change is very, very hard at the local, state and federal levels. Progress is further subject to lobbying….

Emily Deprang:

Alice Waters, the famed chef, author, and activist, addressed a packed house at the Wortham Center’s Cullen Theater in Houston on Monday night, sharing her values and advocating for an “edible education” in public schools.
Waters is widely credited with revolutionizing New American cuisine through her Berkeley, Calif., restaurant, Chez Panisse, which has focused on organic, local, seasonal foods prepared simply ever since its inception in 1971. Her influence as an early champion of farmers markets and school lunch reform can hardly be overstated, though she’s been well recognized along the way. Chez Panisse was named Best Restaurant in America by Gourmet magazine, Waters was named Best Chef in America by the James Beard Foundation, and in 2009, Waters became the only American chef to receive the French Legion of Honor.

Ben Werdmuller:

I’ve had this idea for a story for years. We live in a world where truth is curated for us, everything we do can be tracked and used to infer things about what we’re going to do next, and identity is defined by what we broadcast. What happens when we no longer fit into the narrative?
This year, I’m writing it. It’s called Profiled, and I’ll be releasing it in installments later this year, alongside a blog about taking a lean startup approach to writing a novel. You can sign up for free here. (And yes, these posts and the signup form are my minimum viable product.)
I can’t tell you too much about my actual writing thought process, because I don’t know what to say. I’m getting into the story, which is probably a good sign, but there’s no getting away from the fact that I’ve never done this before. I need professional advice and editing. More on that another time.

Matthew Tully:

I receive the same two questions every time I stand before an audience to talk about the year I spent chronicling one of the worst-performing schools in the state of Indiana.
“What’s the solution?” and “What did you learn?”
The solution, I argue, can be found in the failing schools themselves. Despite all of the problems I found during my year at Manual High, there were pockets of excellence that can serve as a guide. Such as:

• The 25-year-old choir teacher who worked so hard to engage his students that he was often sweating at the end of his classes. By his second year at the school, the choir program had more than tripled in size and previously at-risk students were working harder than ever.
• The Army veteran turned school police officer who spent every day trying to build relationships with students, aware that many needed a mentor and that the relationships he forged today would pay off in times of crisis later.
• The special-needs teacher who was nearing retirement age but just couldn’t imagine walking away from a group of students who suffered from the most profound learning disabilities. Her students wouldn’t go to college, but she knew that if she worked hard enough some would ultimately be able to live semi-independently.

When people ask me for a quick-hit solution to America’s education problems, I instead share the words of Earl Martin Phalen, who runs a program in Indiana that seeks to prevent low-income students from suffering a summer learning loss. Two years ago, a schools superintendent introduced Phalen at a news conference as: “The brains behind the operation.”

Searching for Hope, Life at a Failing School in the Heart of America by Matthew Tully

Brigid Schulte:

It wasn’t that long ago that American parents were gripped with Tiger Mother anxiety. Did we overpraise our kids in the name of promoting self-esteem? Were we forfeiting an Ivy League future for them if we didn’t force them to practice endless hours of violin or rip up birthday cards that weren’t perfect? Were we, as Amy Chua said in her best-selling memoir, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” raising children who were “soft” and “entitled?” ¶ Now, though, it’s the French who have it figured out. Just like Chua’s book, journalist Pamela Druckerman’s recently released “Bringing Up Bebe” — which lauds the “wisdom” of French parents, who love their children but don’t live for them the way American parents do — has hit the bestseller lists. Another new parenting-by-comparison book, “How Eskimos Keep Their Babies Warm,” extols the virtues of the Argentines, who keep Baby up late for special occasions, and the Japanese, who let their kids fight it out. ¶ Such frenzied fascination with foreign parenting raises a question: Are American parents really that bad?
The simple answer is no. Of course we love our children and want what’s best for them. Our problem is that we’re not sure what, exactly — in our driven, achievement-oriented country — is best. Perhaps instead of snapping up the latest foreign fad or obsessing over every international test score ranking, American parents would do well to look no further than a very American ideal: the pursuit of happiness.

Todd Finkelmeyer:

It took nearly five decades, but those producing the Dictionary of American Regional English finally reached Z.
The dictionary, known as DARE, is produced on the UW-Madison campus and includes a range of words, phrases, pronunciations and pieces of grammar that vary from one part of the United States to another.
Like a conventional dictionary, DARE is arranged alphabetically. But the multi-volume DARE goes on to not only give information about a word’s meaning but to indicate where people use it.
Americans, for example, have a collection of words for sandwiches served on a long bun that include meat, cheese, lettuce and tomato. The Dictionary of American Regional English can tell you — and often show you via maps based on fieldwork — where words such as hero, hoagie, grinder, sub, Cuban and the like are the local terms for this kind of sandwich.
The fifth volume of the dictionary, covering Sl through Z, now is available from Harvard University Press.

Penn Medicine:

Researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have put sleeplessness on the map — literally. The research team, analyzing nationwide data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), has produced the first state-by-state sleep maps for the United States, revealing that residents of Southern states suffer from the most sleep disturbances and daytime fatigue, while residents on the West Coast report the least amount of problems. The results are published online in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine.

Neil Steinberg:

When my family moved out of Chicago, we left for only one reason: the schools. Our neighborhood school was substandard, we couldn’t afford to send the boys to private school and weren’t willing to take our chances with the musical chairs game of getting into a magnet school.
So off to Northbrook we fled. And nothing in nearly a dozen years of closely observing two students move through the school system, day by day, from crayoning smiley yellow suns to studying calculus, has made me question the wisdom of that decision. Now we’re seeing the next school generation — families with toddlers moving to our block, following the same path we did. To us, school trumps almost everything.
Not everyone believes that, of course. Most Chicago suburban tax referendums failed last year. From Prospect Heights to Mokena, residents heard the words “tax increase” and said forget it. Times are tight. Who needs good schools?
But look at the result. One of those districts rejecting a referendum last year was West Northfield School District 31. One subdivision — the district covers parts of Northbrook and Glenview — voted 12-to-1 against it. Still the district is trying again this year, but if the referendum doesn’t pass this time, the results will be dire.

Patrick May:

It’s midmorning and the faces of the students in Tim Wesmiller’s religious studies class are bathed in the baby-blue glow of their iPad screens.
Instead of sitting in rigid rows of desks staring at a blackboard, as they would in a typical classroom, kids huddle in groups to brainstorm and blog about Indian culture. Lessons flash from tablets to digitalized white board and back. The “lecture” is a blend of YouTube videos and interactive maps. There’s very little paper and no sign of chalk.
Faculty and students in this two-year iPad pilot project at Archbishop Mitty High School say this is the future of education.
“We still use paper and pencils sometimes,” says Jeremy Pedro, a soft-spoken junior. “But our homework is mostly digital. Paper homework is a thing of the past.”

I have been hearing from constituents who want to know more about how to provide input in addition to the community input sessions. There are at least two easy ways to provide input:

1) Use the on-line form that can be found at: https://www.madison.k12.wi.us/node/10069
2) As always, e-mails sent to board@madison.k12.wi.us will reach all members of the board, the superintendent, and some administrators.

Madison Teachers’, Inc. Solidarity via a kind Jeanne Bettner email:

MTI and the District have been in dispute regarding the interpretation of Section III-R of the Collective Bargaining Agreement regarding Class Covering Pay since 2007 when MTI filed a grievance on behalf of the staff at Sennett Middle School. The grievance was over class covering pay when a substitute teacher is unavailable and students were assigned to other staff.
Resolution was achieved through a grievance mediation process which MTI and the District entered into last school year in an attempt to deal with a backlog of grievances. The process, which was recommended by Mediator/Arbitrator Howard Bellman during negotiations three years ago, is part of a project begun by Northwestern University Law School.
The mediated agreement resulted in clarity to the language that ensures teachers and other teacher bargaining unit members are compensated for covering another teacher’s class while leaving some flexibility for unforeseen emergencies and rare occurrences.
Section III-R states that when the District is unable to assign a substitute teacher to cover for an absent teacher, the building principal must first solicit volunteers from those teachers available to cover the class in question. If no teacher volunteers, the principal may assign a teacher to cover another teacher’s class.
The District had maintained that to be compensated for this work the covering teacher had to lose prep or planning time. MTI disputed that interpretation. In addition, the District contended that classes could be split up and assigned to multiple classrooms without receiving class covering pay.
The following constitutes the resolution of this matter as to when class covering pay is owed to teachers:

Steve Strieker:

In his 2006 memoir Teacher Man, the late, great Frank McCourt tersely wrote, “Teaching is the downstairs maid of professions.”
Just six years later, McCourt’s proposition is already in need of a rewrite. In Walker’s Wisconsin, teaching has been relegated from professional status to political fodder. I fear what will be excreted when the free-market reformers are done masticating education.
Professional distrust reigns in the wake of Gov. Walker’s union-busting legislation created without consideration of professional educators’ input. Too many state and local business-focused politicians and their supporters have promoted unjust resentment for teachers, their unions, their compensation packages, their work conditions, and their professional standing.

George Lightbourn:

And they were right; the public really did not understand the state budget. When our pollster asked what was the largest expenditure in the state budget (school aids at 40% dwarfs everything else), 70% of the people guessed wrong.
And when we asked them how much was spent in Wisconsin’s K-12 schools, the average guess – $6,000 per student – was less than half of what it actually was.
However, while the public might not understand the specifics of the budget, they seem to get the big picture.
Looking at that big picture, we see that Wisconsin is feeling considerably better about the management of state finance today than a couple of years ago. Let’s look at what the polls said.
Leading up to the last election for governor, our pollster asked if the public thought the elected leaders in Madison were, “capable of solving the state budget deficit.” Only 23% said they did. 59% of those same citizens told our pollster that they saw the state budget as a big problem.
What a disconnect. It’s not often that you can actually measure public cynicism, but that is exactly what that poll did. It is ironic that he cause for the cynicism was the very political leaders who were counting on the public on being too dim to understand what was really going on in the budget?
Now, after Governor Walker and the Legislature have rather famously – some would say infamously – balanced the state budget, how is the public feeling? We asked about that last October when 41% of the public said that they actually thought the budget – a budget that included numerous cuts – would actually improve the future quality of life in Wisconsin. This level of approval is surprising given that most people – even Republicans – tend to get weak in the knees when it comes to spending cuts.

Locally, Madison will spend $14,858.40 / student during the 2011-2012 school year. The 2011-2012 budget is roughly $369,394,753 for 24,861 students.

Mike Nichols:

But for the often tumultuous waters of Chequamegon Bay, LaPointe Elementary would have long ago been shuttered and forgotten, its students shuttled off to other schools in other places.
LaPointe is one of the tiniest little grade schools in Wisconsin, perhaps because it is barely even in Wisconsin. It sits on Madeline Island, 2.5 miles by ferry – or even wind sled in years colder than this one – across Superior from Bayfield.
“For safety reasons, the school stays open,” said Carol Sowl, who describes herself as the K-5 school’s sole teacher, janitor and nurse. Crossing the bay can be a treacherous business in some of the colder months when the waters heave and the ice shifts, and makes for too risky a ride for six- and seven-year-olds. In addition, the Bayfield School District that LaPointe is part of receives a lot of tax revenue from the island residents and summer-home owners, many of whom want the school to remain open.

Keith Gerein:

A culture of “political extortion” practised by the Alberta government has been laid bare in a recent letter from northern Conservative MLA Hector Goudreau to a school board, opposition parties allege.
In the Feb. 9 letter obtained by The Journal, Goudreau warned the Holy Family Catholic School Division that criticism of the government could imperil the district’s chances of funding for a new school.
“In order for your community to have the opportunity to receive a new school, you and your school board will have to be very diplomatic from here on out,” the Dunvegan-Central Peace MLA tells district superintendent Betty Turpin.
“I advise you to be cautious as to how you approach future communications as your comments could be upsetting to some individuals. This could delay the decision on a new school.”

Diane Solis:

Inside the small classrooms of Lorenzo de Zavala Elementary School, first-grade students detail recipes, in Spanish, for “limonada,” lemonade. “Agua, hielo, limon.”
In another room, older students construct sentences, in English, with the word “malfunction” as they work through a Star Wars-inspired game. “My brain wasn’t working,” says one boy mischievously. “It had a malfunction.”
Not missing a beat, teacher Charles Stewart tells a Star Wars comrade, “Cesar, turn his brain back on.”
The giggles tumble out. But this is serious teaching and turning brains on is exactly the point. Teaching at this humble elementary school, just west of the Trinity River and a giant new bridge, is part of the most serious restructuring of bilingual education in decades.

Karen Veith:

When I attended the Board of Education meeting back in October 2011, I walked in without expectations. I was there to hear the public testimony on Madison Preparatory Academy and to figure out my own position in this controversy. I listened to everyone speak, but I came away from the meeting conflicted. I realized that my desire to do something to eliminate the achievement gap was as strong as ever, but that something seemed amiss. Rather than rely on what I had read in the media or heard at the podium, I decided to do my homework and read the Urban League’s proposal for this charter school. What I found in its pages confirmed my fears that this was not a solution for the students I serve.
My Thoughts on Madison Preparatory Academy 10/22/2011
Madison Preparatory Academy Still Waiting for Answers 11/07/2011
So, it was with hesitance that I received Superintendent Nerad’s words earlier this month. His summary was well received by those in attendance, but it was just that, a summary. A coworker handed me the 97 page plan and I’m fairly certain a sigh escaped with my “Thank you.” Once again, I was sent home with studying to do.

Howard Blume:

A new fourth-grade reading program recommends using blindfolds to help students learn about sensory details. But in light of the Miramonte Elementary case, district officials consider it prudent to eliminate the eye coverings.
Who knew that blindfolding students was part of the curriculum in the Los Angeles Unified School District?
It was, until last week, when a senior district official nixed a lesson in a new fourth-grade reading program.
The blindfolding of students attracted notice after the January arrest of Miramonte Elementary teacher Mark Berndt, who has pleaded not guilty to 23 counts of lewd conduct for allegedly photographing students blindfolded and being spoon-fed his semen.
In light of that case, blindfolding “may be perceived negatively,” wrote Deputy Supt. of Instruction Jaime Aquino, in a Feb. 23 memo to principals.

OECD:

Obesity rates are still high worldwide, according to a new report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Australia ranks as the fifth worst country in the world for adult obesity, with a rate of 24.6 percent.
The OECD report says obesity is related to inequality, with higher rates among poorer people.
Compare adult obesity rates in OECD countries with this interactive map:

Alan Borsuk:

Five years and three dozen reports later, here’s the biggest thing I have learned when it comes to comparing how kids are doing in Milwaukee Public Schools and in the publicly funded voucher program for private schools:
We’ve got some schools that are getting very good results. But we’ve got a lot of problems, and that’s true across the board. You’ll find schools where weak outcomes are the dominant reality in MPS, in the voucher program and among the independent charter schools. Three major streams of schools in Milwaukee and not much reason to cheer for any of them, in and of themselves.
What’s there to cheer for? Specific high performing schools – voucher, charter and MPS. Specific school leaders, teachers, supporters and kids. Specific people who are pushing to improve the status quo. Specific people who are willing to work together, including across ideological lines, to build up what works and tear down what doesn’t.
What’s there to cheer for? People who are serious participants in the pursuit of quality and results, regardless of the overarching governing and financial structure of their schools.
Five years and three dozen reports later, we know a lot about comparing the streams of Milwaukee education – and, it seems to me, it’s time to move past that. It’s time to focus on success school by school and what can be done to increase it effectively.

Todd Finkelmeyer:

The last sentence of Wood’s blog states: “I should add that, though I am offering a defense of Santorum’s statements on higher education, I am not endorsing him or anyone else in the presidential race.”
Santorum — a candidate for the 2012 Republican Party presidential nomination — earned plenty of media play over the weekend after calling President Barack Obama a “snob” for wanting all students to seek educational opportunities after high school. Santorum made the remark during a Feb. 25 speech at a meeting of Americans for Prosperity in Michigan. He notes plenty of hard-working people make an honest living without ever being “taught by some liberal college professor that is trying to indoctrinate them. Oh, I understand why (Obama) wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image.” (If you want more context, or to hear more of what Santorum said, here is a video of that talk.)
Earlier this year, during a speech at a church in Naples, Fla., Santorum previously noted (according to CBS News): “It’s no wonder President Obama wants every kid to go to college. The indoctrination that occurs in American universities is one of the keys to the left holding and maintaining power in America. And it is indoctrination. If it was the other way around, the ACLU would be out there making sure that there wasn’t one penny of government dollars going to colleges and universities, right?”
To learn more about Santorum’s attacks on higher education, check out this piece by Scott Jaschik of Insidehighered.com.

Ruth Conniff:

It’s crunch time on school vouchers for disabled kids in Wisconsin.
Last summer, I wrote about how Republicans and school choice groups are targeting kids in special ed.
A particularly noxious piece of “school reform” legislation, drafted by ALEC (The American Legislative Exchange Council) and pushed by Republicans in statehouses around the country, would get unsophisticated parents to swap their kids’ federally protected right to a free, appropriate public education for school vouchers of highly dubious value to the kids.
How dubious? An expose in the Miami New Times tracked the fly-by-night academies housed in strip malls where special ed kids with vouchers wasted hours crammed into makeshift classrooms with bored, untrained, and sometimes abusive teachers.

Sam Knight:

Students look at equations from a PhD thesis that uses Bayesian analysis to examine the relation between bond trades and economic data releases. Got that?
On a recent winter’s afternoon, nine computer science students were sitting around a conference table in the engineering faculty at University College London. The room was strip-lit, unadorned, and windowless. On the wall, a formerly white whiteboard was a dirty cloud, tormented by the weight of technical scribblings and rubbings-out upon it. A poster in the corner described the importance of having a heterogenous experimental network, or Hen.
Six of the students were undergraduates. The other three were PhD researchers from UCL’s elite Financial Computing Centre. The only person keeping notes was one of them: a bearded, 30-year-old Polish researcher called Michal Galas. Galas was leading the meeting, a weekly update on the building of a vast new collection of social data, culled from the internet. Under the direction of the PhD students, the undergraduates were writing computer programs to haul millions of pages of publicly available digital chatter – from Facebook, Twitter, blogs and news stories – into a real-time archive which could be analysed for signs of the public mood, particularly in regard to financial markets. Word of the project, known as SocialSTREAM, had reached the City months ago. The Financial Computing Centre was getting calls most days from companies wanting to know when it would be finished. The Bank of England had been in touch.

Megan Garber:

This morning, Elon University and the Pew Internet and American Life Project released a report about the cognitive future of the millennial generation. Based on surveys with more than 1,000 thought leaders — among them danah boyd, Clay Shirky, David Weinberger, and Alexandra Samuel — the survey asked thinkers to consider how the Internet and its environment are changing, for better or worse, kids’ cognitive capabilities.
The survey found, overall, what many others already have: that neuroplasticity is, indeed, a thing; that multitasking is, indeed, the new norm; that hyperconnectivity may be leading to a lack of patience and concentration; and that an “always on” ethos may be encouraging a culture of expectation and instant gratification.
The study’s authors, Elon’s Janna Anderson and Pew’s Lee Rainie, also found, however, another matter of general consensus among the experts they surveyed: that our education systems will need to be updated, drastically, to suit the new realities of the intellectual environment. “There is a palpable concern among these experts,” Rainie puts it, “that new social and economic divisions will emerge as those who are motivated and well-schooled reap rewards that are not matched by those who fail to master new media and tech literacies.” As a result: “Many of the experts called for reinvention of public education to teach those skills and help learners avoid some of the obvious pitfalls of a hyper-connected lifestyle.”

Longitudinal study will not end the debate over education in Milwaukee. More work is still needed to improve education for disadvantaged kids.
A multiyear study tracking students in both Milwaukee’s private voucher schools and Milwaukee Public Schools found that the voucher schools were exceeding the public schools in several key areas. The report’s findings may be significant, especially on reading, but there are still questions, and the bottom line is that improvement and strong accountability are still required for all schools in Milwaukee.
The final installment of an examination of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program shows that voucher schools made significantly higher gains in reading in 2010-’11 than those of a matched sample of peers in MPS. And there also were indications that kids in the choice schools finish high school and go on to college at higher rates than do those in MPS.
The results of the five-year study by Patrick J. Wolf, the study’s lead author and a professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas, have been challenged (see op-eds on the cover of Crossroads and “Another View” below), so the waters certainly are far from crystal clear.

Study’s results are flawed and inconsequential by Alex Molnar and Kevin Welner:

To the evaluators of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, vouchers are like a vaccine. Once students are “exposed” to the voucher program – even if they subsequently leave – that “exposure” somehow accounts for any good things that happen later on.
And leave they did – a whopping 75% of them.
Here are the details: The evaluators began by following 801 ninth-grade voucher recipients. By 12th grade, only about 200 of these students were still using vouchers to attend private school. Three of every four students had left the program.
Given this attrition, the researchers had to estimate graduation rates (as well as college attendance rates and persistence in college) by comparing Milwaukee Public Schools students to students who had been “exposed” to the voucher program – even though most of those students appear to have actually graduated from an MPS school.

Milwaukee’s voucher schools: an assessment by Patrick J. Wolf and John F. Witte

In 2006, the State of Wisconsin passed a law mandating that the School Choice Demonstration Project evaluate the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, the nation’s first private school choice program. The law required that we track a representative sample of choice students for five years and compare their results with similar students in Milwaukee Public Schools.
We did so using an innovative and reliable student matching system in 2006 to create a panel of 2,727 voucher students in grades three through nine and a comparison panel of 2,727 MPS students in similar grades, neighborhoods and with similar initial test scores.
We carefully tracked both groups of students and measured student outcomes from 2007 to 2011. The key outcomes were “attainment,” graduating from high school and enrolling and persisting in college; and “achievement,” measured by growth estimates on state of Wisconsin standardized tests. On Monday, in Milwaukee, we released the final reports from that evaluation.
Our most important finding was that choice students outperformed public school students in educational attainment. We call our attainment results the most important in our study because attainment is a crucial educational outcome. Students who graduate from high school live longer, earn more money during their lifetime and are less likely ever to be divorced, unemployed or incarcerated than students who do not graduate.

Milwaukee’s voucher schools: an assessment – Just a fig leaf for abandoning public schools by Bob Peterson

Good intentions are important, but they don’t ensure reliable information.
The latest privately funded report on academic achievement in the voucher schools, despite good intentions, is ultimately both unreliable and irrelevant.
The report, the final in a five-year longitudinal study, is unreliable for several reasons. First, while it touts findings such as increased high school graduation rates, it buries the fact that most ninth-graders left the voucher schools by their senior year.
Second, the figures on special education numbers are inflated and do not hold up to scrutiny. The only solid data at this point is based on the special-ed participation rate in the state’s standardized tests.
Last year, when for the first time the private voucher schools were required to give the state test, only 1.6% of voucher students were identified as students with special needs. The report can make whatever claims it wants, but that doesn’t mean its claims are legally or educationally legitimate.

Milwaukee’s voucher schools: an assessment – Focus on high-performing schools by Jim Bender

Students in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program are more likely to graduate from high school, get into college and stay in college than students in Milwaukee Public Schools. This is just one of the findings from the nation’s leading scholarly experts on school choice, the School Choice Demonstration Project, in the release of its final reports last week on programs in Milwaukee.
The project used rigorous methods to compare students in the choice program with MPS students.
The comparisons show that the choice program as a whole has higher graduation rates and superior growth in reading scores than MPS. While this is good news for choice students, we need to expand those gains across all sectors of the Milwaukee education market.
One step in that direction is being prepared by a coalition of traditional public, charter and private schools to create a common accountability report card for Milwaukee schools. The effort is led by the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce and others. School Choice Wisconsin and the Choice Schools Association have both been involved in its creation, and it will cover all sectors – traditional public, charter and choice.
The complexities of equitably comparing a wide variety of schools are challenging. Once finalized, the comparative information on schools in the report card will empower parents and community leaders to make better education decisions.

Significantly lower per student spending (voucher vs. traditional public schools) is a material factor in these discussions.

Chris Rickert:

I had a couple of ideas for what to write about the Middleton teacher reinstated to his job by an arbitrator this week after being fired two years ago by the school district for viewing pornographic emails at work.
Maybe a column about why the middle school teacher, Andrew Harris, would even want to return to a district that doesn’t want him.
Maybe decrying the fact his case has taken two years and hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to resolve.
Or maybe even looking at how similar cases might be handled now that union protections have been significantly weakened.
But after reading the arbitrator’s report, what I can’t get over is how a group of ostensibly well-educated professionals in the well-regarded Middleton-Cross Plains School District can come off looking like the cast of “Jersey Shore.”

Herb Kohl Educational Foundation:

Today the Herb Kohl Educational Foundation announced 2012 recipients of Excellence and Initiative Scholarships and Educator Fellowships. Each student recipient will receive a $1000 scholarship. Each educator recipient, and the recipient’s school, will receive $1000.

Liz Boardman:

More than 100 teachers, and some NEA-RI officials, filled West Kingston Elementary School’s cafetorium and spilled over into the library at Tuesday night’s School Committee meeting. They came bearing signs reading, “Stop the Bullies. Speak Up,” “Bully Free Zone,” “Hatchet Job” and “Where is your ‘good-faith’ assessment?'”
They were protesting termination notices given to three non-tenured special education teachers during an executive session on Sunday. Union officials said the fired teachers were not properly evaluated or given an opportunity to improve and were given five minutes to decide if they would prefer to resign.
In an interview Tuesday afternoon, Superintendent Kristen Stringfellow and School Committee Chairwoman Maureen Cotter said they could confirm only that there was an executive session on Sunday and three teachers were given non-renewal notices.
During public comment on Tuesday, social worker Christi Saurette, who works at Peace Dale and Matunuck elementary schools, talked about the district’s bullying policy, and how it teaches students to treat everyone with respect, and how it is important to stand up to a bully, and expose the behavior.

Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:

Just as a blind squirrel can occasionally find an acorn and a broken clock is right twice a day, the Wisconsin legislature every so often passes a bill affecting our schools that includes a sensible idea.
Among its grab bag of changes, Wisconsin Act 105, enacted last December, creates the following new statutory provision:

118.33 (1) (e) A school board may allow a pupil who participates in sports or in another organized physical activity, as determined by the school board, to complete an additional 0.5 credit in English, social studies, mathematics, science, or health education in lieu of 0.5 credit in physical education.

Currently, all high school students in Wisconsin must take three phys ed classes, spread out over three years. The new law would authorize School Boards to reduce the required number of classes by one, in order that the student could take instead a class in English, social studies, math, science or health education.

Appleton Post-Crescent:

We’ve pushed all along for school accountability.
That means accountability for all schools, not just public ones. Private schools that receive taxpayers’ dollars through a voucher program must be held to the same standard as public schools.
That’s why proposed education legislation regarding a statewide school accountability system is flawed. It must include private voucher schools before it is implemented.
Voucher schools were originally part of the new accountability system agreed to by lawmakers, the governor’s office and the Department of Public Instruction. Then, when push came to shove, Republican lawmakers pulled voucher schools out of the mix.

In the winter of 1959-1960, before I went into the Army, I worked at a Gulf Station (now gone) in Harvard Square. The owner of the franchise at the time refused to service VWs and other foreign cars because he said they were just a fad. At about the same time (before we had decided to put a man on the Moon and return him safely to the Earth), General Motors and other American car manufacturers had the attitude that the public would buy whatever vehicles they wanted to make.
Fast forward to the present, and, to a great extent American educators now believe that employers will hire whoever they give diplomas to. But foreign cars were not a fad, and employers in the second decade of the 21st century often do not want to hire the graduates of our high schools because they are not well-educated and they require quite a bit of not just on-the-job training, but basic remediation before they can become good employees. There are hundreds of thousands of American jobs which cannot be filled by Americans because they are not able to do them.
General Motors and its American peers, after many decades and many billions of dollars in losses, did wake up, and American cars are starting to compete again. Sales and profits are growing, after a long dry spell.
There is insufficient sign that American educators realize the crisis they are facing. After reading Marc Tucker’s Surpassing Shanghai, the strongest impression with which I came away was that in this country we are not really serious about education. Now, how can that be, when we have recently spent, as Susan D. Patrick reports, $60 billion on technology for the schools and we are completely awash in edupundits, reform initiatives, school improvement programs, federal initiatives, and professional development? Aren’t we doing all that could possibly be required to compete with our peers in other countries?
No, we aren’t. To take one very crucial first step as an example. In Finland, Singapore, and other successful educational systems, nine out of ten people who want to be teachers are not accepted for training. They want only the best, sort of the way we do when we select and train Navy SEALS. But in this country, just about anyone who thinks they want to try teaching can be accepted into the profession, even when we find that 50% leave within five years.
In South Korea, the country nearly shuts down the day of the very very important high school graduation exam, while in this country we really don’t think there should be one. We claim that anyone and everyone should go on to college, whether they have any chance of knowing enough or studying enough to reach graduation or not (and most don’t). We are being told that everyone who goes to our high schools should also go to our colleges, and our colleges should graduate them, whether they know anything or can do anything or not. They may be uneducated, but, by golly, they will be our college graduates!
How can I say such things, when there are so many diligent people trying to raise educational standards in so many states and so many school districts across the nation? Let me suggest one test. Where is there one public high school in the United States which has said, we will give up our sports and other extracurricular programs entirely until we can make sure that our graduates are truly well-educated and as competent as the best in any other country in the world?
This would be considered not an example of real seriousness, but an example of egregious folly and near-insanity, by our sports fan parents and alums, and immediate plans would follow for the termination of any educator who suggested it, while arrangements were being made to ride them out of town on a rail.
We love our academic mediocrity, because there is so much of it, and it is so very difficult to give up. We do not just have an obesity problem physically in the United States, we have too may fatheads who are addicted to educational junk food, and even in the face of innumerable fad diets, we just refuse to trim ourselves or raise our student accomplishments in education to current international educational standards.
I believe we can do it. We got 12 men to the Moon and brought them back, even during the decade of our American Red Guards yelling and screaming and trying to shut down our universities, with the help of an excited media cheering section.
But of course we cannot make sure all our high school graduates are well-educated, employable, and capable of completing a serious college program if they choose to do one, if we do not take education more seriously than we do now. And we need to start by paying more attention to what other countries are already doing if we are to make the necessary changes in good time.
———————————
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog

Judith Burns:

Poor numeracy is blighting Britain’s economic performance and ruining lives, says a new charity launched to champion better maths skills.
The group, National Numeracy, says millions of people struggle to understand a payslip or a train timetable, or pay a household bill.
It wants to challenge a mindset which views poor numeracy as a “badge of honour”.
It aims to emulate the success of the National Literacy Trust.

Related:

• Math Forum audio/video
• Singapore Math
• Connected Math

Elizabeth Hill:

Governor Bobby Jindal’s goal is simple, provide every child in Louisiana an equal opportunity at a quality education.
He shared his plan for education reform today at the Lafayette Chamber of Commerce.
“We do that by first empowering parents, secondly by empowering great teachers, putting a great teacher in every classroom and third by cutting through the red tape and bureaucracy to give flexibility to our local schools and local school systems.”
Jindal has reiterated many times that more money and more time are not the answer for reform. He says it’s all about more efficient spending.

Melissa Korn:

Only 12% of applicants made it into Harvard Business School last year. It’s Dee Leopold’s job to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Ms. Leopold, managing director of M.B.A. admissions and financial aid at HBS, joined the admissions office after graduating in 1980 and took over its top spot in 2006. Though she doesn’t look at every one of the 9,000-plus submitted applications, Ms. Leopold personally reads applications for the 1,800 candidates invited to interview. About half of those are accepted.
Harvard is accepting more engineers than in the past, as well as students with international experience.

Keith Chen:

Keith Chen, an economist from Yale, makes a startling claim in an unpublished working paper: people’s fiscal responsibility and healthy lifestyle choices depend in part on the grammar of their language.
Here’s the idea: Languages differ in the devices they offer to speakers who want to talk about the future. For some, like Spanish and Greek, you have to tack on a verb ending that explicitly marks future time–so, in Spanish, you would say escribo for the present tense (I write or I’m writing) and escribiré for the future tense (I will write). But other languages like Mandarin don’t require their verbs to be escorted by grammatical markers that convey future time–time is usually obvious from something else in the context. In Mandarin, you would say the equivalent of I write tomorrow, using the same verb form for both present and future.
Chen’s finding is that if you divide up a large number of the world’s languages into those that require a grammatical marker for future time and those that don’t, you see an interesting correlation: speakers of languages that force grammatical marking of the future have amassed a smaller retirement nest egg, smoke more, exercise less, and are more likely to be obese. Why would this be? The claim is that a sharp grammatical division between the present and future encourages people to conceive of the future as somehow dramatically different from the present, making it easier to put off behaviors that benefit your future self rather than your present self.

South China Morning Post:  

The question of whether Hong Kong provides sufficient school places for foreigners who live and work here has been a subject of debate between the business sector and the government for quite some time. Various chambers of commerce have repeatedly warned that long queues to get into international schools have discouraged overseas talent from coming here, while education officials have maintained that there are more than enough places to meet the need.
Recently, both sides have stepped up their arguments, so much so that there is a danger of the debate turning into a confusing numerical game. Amid growing pressure to ease the shortage of school places, the government for the first time last year asked the Census and Statistics Department to look into the matter. Surprisingly, it found that more than 70 per cent of applicants said they had waited less than six months to get an international school place, undermining claims by critics that expatriate children are often on waiting lists for years. The department also found that only one in four pupils attending international schools planned to apply for secondary school places here.

Kevin Carey:

Like millions of other Americans, Barbara Solvig lost her job this year. A fifty-year-old mother of three, Solvig had taken college courses at Northeastern Illinois University years ago, but never earned a degree. Ever since, she had been forced to settle for less money than coworkers with similar jobs who had bachelor’s degrees. So when she was laid off from a human resources position at a Chicago-area hospital in January, she knew the time had come to finally get her own credential. Doing that wasn’t going to be easy, because four-year degrees typically require two luxuries Solvig didn’t have: years of time out of the workforce, and a great deal of money.
Luckily for Solvig, there were new options available. She went online looking for something that fit her wallet and her time horizon, and an ad caught her eye: a company called StraighterLine was offering online courses in subjects like accounting, statistics, and math. This was hardly unusual–hundreds of institutions are online hawking degrees. But one thing about StraighterLine stood out: it offered as many courses as she wanted for a flat rate of $99 a month. “It sounds like a scam,” Solvig thought–she’d run into a lot of shady companies and hard-sell tactics on the Internet. But for $99, why not take a risk?

Melissa Westbrook:

or the second time in a week, I have been dazzled by some great writing on education. The Times has an op-ed by SPS high school teacher, Dan Magill, in response to the op-ed by Brad Smith (whose piece was about needed ed reform).
He very plainly sets out the challenge and the goal:

I would like to reframe the reality. There aren’t two sides. There are four corners. And in the middle hangs the goal: a sober-minded, analytical, skilled population that seizes opportunities by the gray matter.
Waiting in corner one, the students — a word I’ll define shortly. Warming up in corner two, the good teachers. The bad teachers don’t get a corner, partly because there aren’t very many of them. Corner three features the employers — people who just want dependable, qualified employees. And in corner four, we have the reform crowd — ones who influence educational policy regardless of their qualifications for doing so. These are the “meddlers.”

Taylor Nye:

Madison, Wisconsin is a city divided. Downtown areas of predominately higher socioeconomic status are associated, in this case, with Caucasian residents. Other areas, such as South Park Street, are physically removed from downtown and are home to residents of lower socioeconomic status. These residents, to some degree, are of other ethnic groups, including African Americans and Hispanics.
In Madison, this seems an anomaly. We are a small city, the state’s capitol, and the seat of many social service agencies that serve Wisconsin. However, the disparity in socioeconomic status is still present and manifests itself in a very important way: the high school achievement gap. Unfortunately, this gap has yet to be addressed in a meaningful way, and it’s not looking good for the near future. As reported by the Capital Times, the four-year high school graduation rate of African Americans in Madison is 48% that of their white counterparts. African Americans also score much lower on standardized tests.
Many felt that the Madison School District was not doing enough to combat this glaring inequality. Therefore, Kaleem Caire, the head of the Greater Urban League of Greater Madison, drew up plans for a charter school for ethnic minorities. Fundamental tenets of the proposed school, Madison Preparatory Academy, included longer hours, uniforms, same sex classrooms, and teachers and advisors from ethnic backgrounds that would act as both instructors and mentors to students.

ed.gov via a kind reader’s email:

Event Date 1: March 02, 2012 10:00 am – 11:00 am
UPDATE: This event will be webcasted live at 10 a.m. ET. To watch, go to http://www.ustream.tv/channel/education-department. Viewers are also invited to join the conversation on Twitter at #EdCities.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan will join New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel together with their Superintendents, Dennis Walcott, John Deasy and Jean-Claude Brizard, to host a forum titled, “Education Now: Cities at the Forefront of Reform.” The forum will be held Friday, March 2, from 10 to 11 a.m. at American University.

Simon Parry:

In the playground of a gated private housing estate in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, a businessman in a smart suit and winter coat stands beside a rope bridge as his four-year-old son steps gingerly across it. As the boy reaches the middle, his father suddenly shakes it violently from side to side.
Caught by surprise, the boy appears unsure whether to laugh or burst into tears. He clings grimly to the side of the rope bridge as the businessman throws back his head and laughs, shouting to his son: “Go on, go on.” Other parents look on with a mixture of alarm and bemusement.
This, as you have probably gathered, is no ordinary father. He Liesheng is the self-styled “eagle dad”, whose extreme tough-love approach to child-rearing made headlines worldwide when, on a winter break in New York, he forced his son, He Tide, to run nearly naked and do press-ups in the snow in temperatures of minus 13 degrees Celsius. In a bizarre 90-second video posted online, the young boy – known by his nickname Duo Duo, which means “more, more” – shivers pathetically and begs his parents in vain for a hug while standing in the snow wearing only his yellow underpants and a pair of trainers.