School Information System

College Admissions: Tense Times in Bronxville

Susan Dominus:

IN THE WEE HOURS OF THE MORNING last Halloween, Maria Devlin and her mother, Donna, were both wide awake in their apartment in Bronxville, N.Y., scanning an essay that shared Maria’s most profound thoughts on “one or two of her principal intellectual interests.” The buzz from what had become, of late, a 10 p.m. ritual hot chocolate — part soothing balm, part energizing caffeine — had come and gone. Now they were struggling to focus on proofreading that essay as well as some other college application forms due to be mailed the next day. On photocopied pages, they practiced squeezing Maria’s many accomplishments — National Merit finalist, area all-state flutist (honor ensemble), numerous playwriting awards — into the too-small lines scattered throughout the page. Once Maria’s mother found a way to make it all fit, with abbreviations and tiny, neat letters, Maria would commit the list to the official page in clean, precise writing. Around 2 in the morning, a friend sent Maria an e-mail message: What are you doing? Maria told her and fired back the same question. A.P. American history, the friend wrote. Gotcha, wrote Maria. She had already aced her Advanced Placement exams in American history, world history and French, not to mention calculus, a class she took her junior year, one of only four students in her grade at Bronxville High School to do so. It was accomplishments like that, as well as her near-perfect SATs, her near-perfect G.P.A., her in-progress novel and her natural gifts as a studio artist that put Maria, then 17, in line for the scholarship for which she was applying.

That night, she was finishing off her application for the Woodruff Scholarship at Emory University in Atlanta, a full ride that would cover room, board and tuition. Other students worried about just getting into a good school; Maria was worried about getting one of those schools to take her in its arms and give her everything she needed and perhaps a little bit more — money for books or maybe funds for summer travel. Her father’s income as a computer programmer placed the family in that awkward spot, comfortable enough that they couldn’t be sure of comprehensive financial aid but so stretched with three kids in a high-tax town that even a generous scholarship, if it was incomplete, would leave them in difficult straits. In applying to a typically competitive school, her classmates were looking at odds like 1 in 4 or maybe 1 in 10. Maria, in shooting for a full merit scholarship, was looking at odds like 1 in 100. More than 2,600 students were nominated by their high schools to apply for Emory’s scholarship program, for example, but only 23 would be chosen for the Woodruff.

Commentary: State vs. Federal (NAEP) Tests

Diane Ravitch:

THE release this week of national test scores in reading and math was an embarrassment for the state Department of Education. Scores nationally and in many individual states showed modest gains from 2005 to 2007, but New York did not - even though the Education Department had trumpeted "gains" on its tests just weeks earlier.

The federally sponsored National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is known in the education world as the gold standard of testing. In 2002, Congress authorized NAEP testing in every state to serve as a check of the states' own claims about their progress. (Congress rightly worried that individual states would dumb-down tests that they themselves develop and administer.)

Just a few months ago, the state Education Department celebrated large gains for eighth-grade students in both reading and math. In May and June, The New York Times ran front-page stories heralding major improvements in the state test scores for eighth-graders: "Eighth Graders Show Big Gain in Reading Test" and "City Students Lead Big Rise on Math Tests."

In grade 8, the Education Department reported, the share of students meeting state reading standards jumped from 49.3 percent to 57 percent - a remarkable single-year rise, especially in a grade where academic performance had stagnated for several years. Similarly, the portion of eighth-graders meeting state math standards jumped from 53.9 percent to 58.8 percent.

These are very impressive gains. Unfortunately, they all failed to show up in the NAEP results (a fact the Times mentioned not on its front page but at the end of a story on page A20).

9/24/2007 Performance & Achievement Meeting: 4 Year Old Kindergarden & "A Model to Measure Student Performance with Ties to District Goals"

The Madison School Board's Performance & Achievement Committee met Monday evening. Topics discussed included:

• 4 Year Old Kindergarden
• A Model to Measure Student Performance with Ties to District Goals (39 Minutes into the mp3 file). Growth vs status goals. MMSD proposes to adopt a "Valued Added" which will "control for the effects of different external factors":
  • poverty
  • mobility
  • parent education
  • english language proficiency, and
  • race and ethnicity.
  District Goal: Look at the composite overall average growth for the district across all schools and all grade levels in the areas of reading and math. Based on the WKCE scores.
  
  30MB 87 Minute mp3 audio file.
  
  Notes: 56 minutes (Maya Cole): "Why are we using WKCE and how is that going to tie into our curriculum and student improvement so that it ends up back in the classroom and not just measuring test scores?". Art Rainwater responded that "this kind of measurement is not expected to do the day to day informing of instruction inside the classroom", "informing the instruction occurs inside the classroom on a day to day basis". Art also mentioned the District's "Student Intervention Monitoring system [also SIMS]. [1:00]".
  Posted by Jim Zellmer at 5:00 PM Subscribe to this site via RSS/Atom: Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas

An Update on the Foundation For Madison Public Schools

Susan Troller:

"Be true to your school" could be the motto of a challenge the Foundation for Madison's Public Schools has issued to friends and supporters of public education here.

According to Martha Vukelich-Austin, foundation president, it's taken less than 10 months for over half the schools in Madison to meet a challenge grant aimed at helping build individual endowments at every local elementary, middle and high school in the city.

The foundation is an independent, nonprofit community group that raises money to help support public education in Madison.

The grant promises to match every dollar raised at each individual school with 50 cents from the Madison Community Foundation -- which manages the funds for the Foundation for Madison Public Schools -- up to $3,750 at each of 48 schools. Pledges totalling up to $180,000 will yield an extra $90,000 for the schools, for a total of $270,000 to be divided among 48 schools.

.......

For example, Mendota Elementary School, with one of Madison's highest poverty rates among its students but strong academic scores, had an endowment of $36,745 as of the second week in September. Other elementary schools with impressive endowments include Thoreau, with $54,968, and Shorewood, with $39,047.

East High School has an endowment of $82,944, and tiny Shabazz City High has an endowment of $63,027, compared with West High School's $26,800, Memorial High School's $26,397 and La Follette High School's $13,632.

Among middle schools, Cherokee and Spring Harbor lead the pack with $63,886 and $59,855 respectively.

Local entrepreneur John Taylor provided a $250K "Challenge Grant" in December, 2003. It would be interesting to add his perspective to the the conversation. Clusty Search on John Taylor.

A Law Best Left Behind

Jason Riley:

With its focus on testing, achievement, accountability and transparency, the No Child Left Behind Act has undoubtedly altered the terms of the education debate in the U.S. But the law, which is set to expire this year, remains seriously flawed, and the Bush administration's weak enforcement of its best provisions argues against renewal.

George Miller, the 17-term liberal Democrat from California who chairs the House Education Committee, has issued a reauthorization draft proposal, and his provisions aren't entirely without merit -- he wants performance pay for teachers -- but almost. On balance, his proposals do nothing to close accountability loopholes in NCLB and in most cases would expand them.

Mr. Miller's "multiple measures" provision is a good example. NCLB uses math and reading test scores to determine whether students in a school are making Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) toward proficiency. Mr. Miller's changes would allow schools to use less rigorous measures -- like social-studies test results, good attendance and dropout rates -- to grade AYP. We've gotten to the point where some consider merely showing up for school to be the equivalent of learning.

The soft bigotry of low expectations is also apparent in Mr. Miller's plan to allow "local assessment" of educational progress. Right now, each state is charged with implementing its own academic norms and applying them uniformly in all school districts. Everyone in Illinois takes the same exam to measure AYP. Under the proposed changes, school districts would be allowed to walk away from state standards and create their own tests. The ability to compare districts would vanish, along with another way for parents to hold schools accountable.

Monona Grove Superintendent Moves on

Karyn Seamann:

Gary Schumacher's future is as wide open as the no-walls classrooms he taught in 30 years ago.

His "new adventure" might involve teaching at the college level, which he has dabbled in, or a job in the private sector.

It will likely be somewhere warm.

"I've gotten less tolerant of Wisconsin winters," said Schumacher, who announced last week he would leave his post as Monona Grove superintendent on June 30, with some ideas but no specific plan for what comes next.

Schumacher has been superintendent of Monona Grove since 2000.

"There have been challenging times here, no doubt, but this has been a great experience. It's just time to move on," he said.

School Board President John Kitslaar said the search for a replacement will begin in October. The first step, he said, will be deciding whether to hire a consultant to oversee the process or to handle it in-house.

How To Calculate School Taxes

Waukesha Taxpayer's League:

Waukesha Forward has published their new newsletter and much of what they said, we agree with-the support the AB447, AB448 and AB449, the call on the union to slow down the rate of growth of teachers' salaries. However, while we appreciate the board's attempt to slow down the administrative salaries, we believe they should have been frozen. If our district adminstrative costs were brought into line with other districts (per position comparison), our district could have saved hundreds of thousands (see WaukeshaForward.org). In addition to slowing down the rate of growth in teacher salaries, we also believe there needs to be changes in the insurance--copays AND contributions to premiums. These are all things that the Waukesha Taxpayers League has supported for a very long time.

Now that we are coming into tax season, we will give a lesson on how to calculate school taxes. This has been an area of contention we have had with the school district and the way the tax increases get underplayed. Sometimes, the newspaper catches the misreprentation and sometimes they don't.

The slowing real estate market will place more emphasis on "mill rate" increases vs. assessed values.

Somes schools, students make a hash of anti-junk food law

Stacy Finz:

Despite a new law designed to ban the sale of junk food at California schools, the kiosk at Santa Clara High is stocked with chocolate-chip cookies, the lunch window at Novato High serves up potato chips, and the concession stand at Albany High is doing a booming business in Cheetos.

But don't call the food police. All three districts are in compliance with the state law that requires snacks and individual entrees sold on campus to contain fewer calories and less fat and sugar.

It seems that while kids were preparing to go back to school this fall, food manufacturers were busy re-creating their products - shrinking portions, eliminating trans fats and baking instead of frying - to make them meet the requirements of the Food Nutrition Standards Bill by July 1.

The statute is intended to improve students' diets by nudging them into eating a well-rounded healthful lunch. But so far, that goal has proved elusive. Some campuses, such as Piedmont Middle School, appear to be ignoring the regulations altogether. And others let kids make a meal of revamped snack foods.

The New Affirmative Action

David Leonhardt:

In another time, it wouldn’t have been too hard to guess where Frances Harris would have ended up going to college. She has managed to do very well in very difficult circumstances, and she is African-American. Her high school, in the Oak Park neighborhood of Sacramento, was shut down as an irremediable failure the spring before her freshman year, then reopened months later as a charter school. Midway through high school, her father developed heart problems and became an irritable fixture around the home. She also discovered that he was not actually her biological father. That was a man named Leroy who, when her mother took Harris to see him, simply said his name was George and waited for her to leave. In Harris’s senior year, her mother lost her job at a nursing home and the family filed for bankruptcy.

Harris somehow stayed focused on teenage life. She earned an A-minus average and she distinguished herself as a debater. Her basketball teammates sometimes teased her for using big words, but they also elected her co-captain. As she led me on a tour of her school and her neighborhood one day this summer, she introduced me around with an assured ease that most adults can’t manage, even if her sentences are peppered with “like,” “you know” and “Oh, my God.” Her bedroom in the bungalow she shares with her parents is a masterpiece of teenage energy, the walls covered with her prom-queen tiara, her purple-and-white basketball jersey (No. 3) and photos of her friends. “The hardest part of high school,” she says, “was to be smart and cool at the same time.” She decided her dream college was the University of California, Los Angeles.

Ten or 20 years ago, Frances Harris almost certainly would have been admitted. Her excellent grades might not have even been necessary, because Berkeley and U.C.L.A. — the jewels in the U.C. system — accepted almost all of the African-Americans who met the basic application requirements. To an admissions officer, Harris would have seemed like gold: diversity and achievement, wrapped up in a single kid.

Residents Meet to Discuss Future of Madison Schools

Channel3000:

Madison residents met Thursday night to share ideas and concerns about the future of area schools.

A district-wide community roundtable tackled issues dealing with budget cuts, school closures, and school board leadership.

Residents from all over the city also discussed statewide education funding reform, keeping neighborhood schools open and improving the overall budget process.
Organizers said the roundtable helps stimulate new ideas and make current ones stronger.

"Even people who think they know each other and know each other's points of view, when they really sit down and talk, they realize, 'Oh, I didn't know that about you. I didn't know you shared that concern,'" said Rebecca Kemble, co-chair of the East Attendance Area PTO.

A district-wide forum with the Madison School Board is set for Oct. 21 at 3 p.m. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Memorial Union.

Donor Of New Atlases Says Schools Shrugged Them Off

Susan Troller:

Don Becker finds it odd and annoying that in a time of dwindling resources and a beleaguered budget he's had trouble giving money to Madison's public schools.

It's not that he hasn't tried, and hasn't been successful in the past, at providing help to a number of schools on items ranging from books to bus rides to practice shirts for girls' athletic teams.

But when it came to signing a check for $2,500 last year to buy updated atlases for classrooms at Muir Elementary School, Becker's money disappeared into a bureaucratic hole at the Doyle Administration Building for months on end. When he tried to follow up on what happened to his donation, he said he was given several different explanations for the delay in purchasing the books.

The bottom line was that when his wife went back this fall to volunteer in her favorite classroom, there was still no sign of the atlases.

Last week, in frustration, Becker called Rand-McNally, the publisher, and bought the atlases himself at what he says is a better price than the district had negotiated. Then he asked for his money back.

According to Becker, he was initially told by Steve Hartley, the district's chief of staff, that although he would get his donation returned, the district would not provide its sales tax certificate number to Rand-McNally so that the $127 tax charged to Becker for the purchase of the atlases could be reimbursed.

School crimes under wraps: Assaults, robberies not always reported to police

Jessica Blanchard & Casey McNerthney:

King County prosecutors on Wednesday charged two Seattle teenagers in a sexual assault on a developmentally disabled female classmate in a Rainier Beach High School restroom in June -- an incident that school officials never reported to police.

A Seattle P-I review of police and Seattle Public Schools records shows that case isn't the only likely crime that wasn't reported to police. While a majority of incidents on school campuses were recorded into the district's safety and security logs and reported to police if necessary, some incidents weren't -- including cases of assaults and strong-arm robberies.

In a few cases, parents or victims say school officials urged them not to report the crimes to police at all.

Pegi McEvoy, who recently took over as interim manger of Seattle schools' safety and security department, acknowledged that the district had a "fragmented" system for documenting and tracking alleged crimes on campuses. This fall, though, district security specialists began filing their reports electronically -- one of a handful of changes intended to streamline and strengthen the reporting process, she said.

Related:

• Data on School Crime Hard to Obtain
• Madison School Parent's Safety Site

Helicopter Parenting: a Breakdown

Sue Shellenbarger:

Among my many private worries as a parent, I've wondered if I hover too much. New research on helicopter parents confirms it: I am one.

I have plenty of company. An estimated 40% to 60% of college parents qualify as helicopter parents, and they come from all socioeconomic groups, based on a thought-provoking study of 75 officials, professors and staff at 15 universities. The study, which is drawing attention on campuses, moves the helicopter-parent debate onto new ground by identifying types of parental hovercraft, ranging from benign to pathological.
There's room to disagree on the boundaries of healthy parental involvement with college-age students, the focus of the research. Nevertheless, I found the typology a helpful lens for sizing up my parenting. If you're wondering where you stand, here are a few of the most distinct types:

NAEP Math Results: Ohio and Wisconsin Comparison

The 2007 NAEP results have just been released. There are many interesting results one can learn by looking at this data. In addition to the very serious racial gap in Wisconsin which has been commented on by The Educational Trust [Grade 4 Math NAEP Analysis | 80K PDF ] [Grade 8 Math NAEP Analysis | 80K PDF] and the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction [172K PDF], there are strong indications of other problems in mathematics education in Wisconsin. Consider the following data comparing results for whites and blacks in Ohio and Wisconsin from the first year NAEP results were given by states and the 2007 results. As background, 12 points on NAEP is generally thought to be about the change from one year to the next on a given test. This is not a good estimate when looking over 15 to 17 years, since part of the rise in the test score likely came from changes made in textbooks and in what teachers teach because of the change in the NAEP Framework in the early 1990s.

For example, in Trends in Mathematics and Science Study, TIMSS, fourth grade math was tested in 1995 and 2003, and the results were flat while the NAEP results went up enough to allow statisticians to conclude the increase was statistically significant.

I assume that some of the rise in NAEP over this period is because students are learning more about the topics covered in NAEP, but that this is not the only reason for the rise in NAEP scores.

The data below is comparison data between the results in two states at two different years, so the point estimate for a year of schooling seems to be a reasonable guideline. If so, Wisconsin has lost about a year to Ohio. Something needs to be done about this.

NAEP Fourth Grade Mathematics
Whites	1992	2007
Wisconsin	233	250
Ohio	222	250	Ohio gained 11 points on Wisconsin
Blacks	1992	2007
Wisconsin	195	212
Ohio	194	225	Ohio gained 14 points on Wisconsin

NAEP Eighth Grade Mathematics
Whites	1990	2007
Wisconsin	279	292
Ohio	268	291	Ohio gained 10 points on Wisconsin
Blacks	1990	2007
Wisconsin	236	247
Ohio	233	258	Ohio gained 14 points on Wisconsin

Five Ways to Boost Charter Schools

Jay Matthews:

Sara Mead and Andrew J. Rotherham, two of my favorite educational researchers, have inspired me to save the charter school movement with five brilliant if perhaps too far-sighted suggestions for reform.

The Washington-based think tank Education Sector www.educationsector.org has just published their paper, "A Sum Greater Than the Parts: What States Can Teach Each Other About Charter Schooling." They may be horrified by what I have done with their facts and insights, but I think my ideas will push charters in the right direction -- more good ones and fewer bad ones.

In theory, charter schools are a great idea. There are now more than 4,000 of them with more than 1 million students in 40 states and the District. These independent public schools give smart educators with fresh ideas a chance to show what they can do without the deadening hand of the local school system bureaucracy around their necks. They also give public school parents more choice. The problem is, as one former state charter school official told me, there are a lot of loons out there starting charter schools. We don't seem to be able to get rid of their loony schools as easily as the original advocates of charter schools promised. That is one reason why charter schools, despite including some of the best public schools I have ever seen, do no better on average than regular public schools in raising student achievement.

Here are my suggestions for fixing that situation, based largely on what I learned from Mead and Rotherham:

1. Stop letting local school boards authorize charters. Mead, a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation, and Rotherham, co-director of Education Sector and a member of the Virginia Board of Education, used a grant from the Annie E.Casey Foundation to analyze reports they oversaw on charter schools in California, Minnesota, Arizona, Ohio, Texas, Colorado, Florida and Michigan and four cities: New York, Indianapolis, Chicago and the District. They conclude that "perhaps the most significant lesson of the charter school movement to date" is that the number and quality of charter schools depend on who does the authorizing and how well they do it. State school boards, universities and independent bodies like the D.C. Public Charter School Board appear to do a better job of authorizing charters than local school boards, which see charters as competition for students, funds and prestige. California, Colorado and Florida have built strong charter systems with local school boards as the prime authorizers, but only by creating alternative authorizers for charter proposals that get turned down by local school boards.

The complete report is available here: Education Sector Reports: Charter School Series
A Sum Greater Than the Parts: What States Can Teach Each Other About Charter Schooling, by Sara Mead and Andrew Rotherham.

'Ho-hum' says much about school choice foes

Patrick McIlheran:

Ho-hum: Another study suggesting good results from school choice in Milwaukee, not that it will make much of a dent with the opposition.

This tells you something about the opposition.

The latest study links the ability of poor parents to take state aid to religious schools to improvements at Milwaukee Public Schools.

Researcher Rajashri Chakrabarti found that while school choice showed little effect on MPS early on, it showed a much bigger effect after key changes in late 1990s: The Wisconsin Supreme Court cleared the way for religious schools to take part, greatly increasing the options, and changes in funding made MPS feel the loss of students more keenly.

Math, language arts and reading scores at Milwaukee's public schools showed more improvement after new competition came into the picture, says Chakrabarti. Scores improved more at schools that were more subject to competition - schools where a greater proportion of students were poor and could use a voucher if their parents chose. This shows the improvements weren't driven by other changes in MPS, such as new leadership. It was the increased competition, she says.

It's plain to Fuller, a former MPS superintendent, that choice helps public schools, too. "It gives a superintendent leverage," he says. While there are many in MPS who try improving schools out of professionalism, there are some teachers and administrators who resist reform. Competition strengthens the reformers' hand.

More Notes on the Madison Superintendent Search

Rebecca Kremble: [Additional Links & Background here]

Last week, the consultants hired to organize the superintendent search conducted 31 hour-long individual and focus group sessions to gather information from concerned citizens and stakeholders about the strengths and challenges of the Madison School District, as well as characteristics we would like to see in the next superintendent.

I attended three of these sessions -- two general community sessions and the Parent-Teacher Organization representatives ' focus group.

Many different opinions were expressed on a broad array of topics, but in each there was widespread agreement about two issues: the need for a more transparent budget process and the vastly underused resource of potential partnerships with parents, businesses and community members who are willing to participate in the creation of a thriving public education system that benefits all of our students.

Many people also expressed the perception that the School Board is powerless in relation to the administration. This perception is fueled by the fact that the board as a whole is actually not connected to its source of power (the residents of the district) in any broad-based, comprehensive way.

It is time for concerned citizens to find common ground on district-wide issues so that we can give the board the support it needs to make principled, proactive decisions about the future of our schools, instead of making decisions that falsely pit schools against each other or that divide taxpayers who have children in public schools from those who do not.

The district is at a point of great opportunity with the promise of a new superintendent, the pressures of a possible referendum, and a School Board that seems willing to engage the public in productive dialogue based on shared concerns rather than divisive ones. (At its planning meeting with the search consultants, the board requested that the written surveys be returned to them so that they could use the input for planning purposes not connected with the superintendent search.)

Over the summer, the Northside Planning Council and the East Attendance Area PTO Coalition have conducted a house meeting campaign to discuss residents ' concerns about and hopes for the district.

We have had more than 20 house meetings on the North and East sides of town. In an attempt to reach out to the rest of the community, we will be host to a community roundtable at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday at the Madison Senior Center, 330 W. Mifflin.

We invite anybody who wishes to contribute to this process to join us. We will break into small groups, share personal stories and concerns about how the Madison School District operates, and tease out common themes.

In a public meeting on Oct. 21, we will share the results of the house meetings and roundtable with board member and ask them to act upon the specific issues that we will have identified.

We hope this campaign will be the first step in shifting the relationship between the community and the School Board away from reactive, crisis-driven involvement, toward mutually satisfying, cooperative efforts that benefit the most underused resource in our district -- the creative genius of each and every one of our children.

Kemble is co-chairperson of the East Attendance Area PTO Coalition.

WI reading gap is nation's worst

From a story by Alan J. Borsuk in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

The average reading ability for fourth- and eighth-grade black students in Wisconsin is the lowest of any state, and the reading achievement gap between black students and white students in Wisconsin continues to be the worst in the nation.

Those are among the facts found in a mass of testing results released Tuesday by the U.S. Department of Education, the latest results from a long-standing federal program called the National Assessment of Education Progress. It is the closest thing to a nationwide standardized testing program for reading and math ability.

The gap between blacks and whites was worse in Wisconsin than, say, Louisiana? Yes.

The average score for black fourth-graders in reading was lower than, say, Washington, D.C., or Alabama? Yes.

"Why are You Sweating?"

Teacher Lance Chapman:

I asked all 140 of my eighth-grade students to divide 10 by 2. Just eight of them wrote down 5.

I knew my students would need remedial work, but I had no idea it would be to this extent. One of the first standards for eighth-grade physical science is manipulating this equation: speed equals distance divided by time (S = D/T). This is a foundation for upper-level skills in physical science. Next come velocity, acceleration, and gravity. I knew that many of my eighth-grade students would have trouble converting fractions into decimals, but I never fathomed that 10 divided by 2 would give so many of them trouble.

They made comments such as, “Mr. Chapman, this is science class, not math class. I hate math.” Almost half of the first periodic assessment given in November will be based on division, multiplication, and addition to solve for a scientific term. Division remedial work was a must.

How a Virtual AP Course Changed Her Son

Jay Matthews:

Maria Allen worried about her son Matthew's prospects in high school and beyond. He had always been regarded as an underachiever by his teachers. He received B's in middle school with virtually no effort because he did well on what were, she thought, very easy tests.

Every new school year, the Reston mother donned her Super Nag persona, got on his case and tried to turn around his bad habits and attitude. It never worked. By the second quarter, whenever her attention turned to other matters, he stopped working, and his teachers started complaining.

So she was more than a little surprised when Matthew asked if he could take an Advanced Placement biology course online at the beginning of eighth grade, when he was only 14 years old. She knew where he got the idea. His big brother, a high school junior, had signed up for online AP biology so he would have time for other courses during the school day. She laughed. Good joke, Matthew. But he brought it up again. He was serious. Even when she showed him the demanding syllabus on the Web site apexlearning.com, he did not back down.

Well, she thought, why not? Her Super Nag act had not worked. She paid the $600 course fee and waited, without much hope, to see what would happen next.

"Matthew continued to put negligible effort into his middle-school work," Allen told me, "but in biology, he started to work hard, very hard, in fact. And, even more remarkably, he continued to work hard throughout the year."

She said he took a full complement of eighth-grade honors courses, but they demanded very little. "Unencumbered by any significant homework," she said, "Matt had plenty of time available to log on to AP bio for a few hours each evening, and so he often did better on AP quizzes and assignments than my high school junior, who was always swamped with homework and competing deadlines from several other challenging courses."

The Legacy of Little Rock

Shelby Steele:

ifty years ago today, riot-trained troops from the 101st Airborne Division escorted nine black students through the doors of Central High School in Little Rock. Just 48 hours earlier, President Eisenhower deployed--in a single day--1,000 troops to restore order and to reassert federal authority in Arkansas's capital city.

For weeks the entire nation had watched on television as a mob of angry white adults gathered each morning to prevent the nine black students from integrating Central High. It would come to be remembered as one of the ugliest and meanest white mobs of the entire civil rights era. And because of television--then still a very new medium--the horrible images of people galvanized by ferocious racial hatred were seared into the national consciousness.

Finally, Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus succumbed to a kind of madness, if not to a perverse politics of racial hatred, and withdrew the National Guard from Central High, effectively turning the school over to the raging mob. The nine courageous black students, who had suffered so much to integrate the school, were withdrawn for their own protection. So, for a time, the authority of the mob prevailed over all governmental authority--local, state and federal. And this was the provocation that pushed a reluctant President Eisenhower to deploy federal troops.

Board Talks Will Focus on a New Blueprint

Susan Troller
The Capital Times
September 25, 2007

Football coach Barry Switzer's famous quote, "Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple," could easily apply to schools and school districts that take credit for students who enter school with every advantage and continue as high achievers all along.

But how do you fairly judge the job that teachers, schools and districts with many children who have significant obstacles -- obstacles like poverty, low parental expectations, illness and disability or lack of English proficiency -- are doing? Likewise, how do you make certain that your top students are adding growth every year as they go through school, rather than just coasting toward some average or proficient standard?

Those kinds of complex questions are at the heart of a discussion that the Madison School Board will be having over the next several months.

At its Performance and Achievement Committee meeting Monday night, the Madison district began taking its first steps toward developing what's called a value-added assessment system for measuring the growth of its students year by year.

It would add demographic data about every student as it charts his or her performance on the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam, which is administered every fall in grades 3 through 8, and in 10th grade.

The WKCE test is the basis for determining how well public schools in Wisconsin are meeting the requirements of the federal government's No Child Left Behind legislation.

This kind of system is being used in other larger districts, including Milwaukee, committee chair Lawrie Kobza said.

If the blueprint for the assessment system -- based on the actual academic growth of students in 3rd through 8th grades in reading and math -- is implemented, it would supplement the way student achievement in Madison is measured by factoring in a number of external factors including income, mobility, parent education levels, the number of adults in the household, ethnicity, English language proficiency, gender and special education status.

The resulting data would allow the board, the administration, the staff and the community to see what kind of teaching methods are working, or not working, for individual students, and for groups of students.

"We're looking at a much finer analysis of how our children are performing," Rainwater said at Monday night's meeting.

In addition, he said, the value-added assessment system would provide a much more nuanced look at how each school is performing, recognizing both the potential assets and obstacles students are bringing to their academic experience.

"I think the growth model is absolutely the right path to follow, and a critical way to measure our progress," Kobza said in an interview today.

"Regardless of where you start in school, you're expected to make progress. If you're at the high end, it's not good enough to coast," she said. And she added that kids who start lower are also expected to make significant, regular improvement.

The use of the growth-based model would be done in conjunction with a refinement of the Madison district's goals, which include all students reading at or above grade level in 3rd grade and all students completing algebra by the end of 9th grade and geometry by the end of 10th grade.

"I think this change is critical. Our existing goals have served us very well for a number of years but they are static measurements," Kobza explained. "This would really allow us to look at goals that are applicable each year.

"We'll probably bring our own refinements to how we'd implement this, but overall it's not a brand new thing we're creating," she added.

Madison School District Talented & Gifted Spending vs. Total Budget

Madison United for Academic Excellence has a meeting this evening:

Out of Level Testing Opens Doors of Opportunity, Midwest Academic Talent Search—MATS)," 7:00 p.m. McDaniels Auditorium, Doyle Administration Building, 545 W. Dayton Street. [Map]

This chart presents a useful opportunity to review spending via the handy $339M+ MMSD Citizen's Budget for 2007-2008 (The citizen's budget is one of the work products from Lawrie Kobza's stint on the finance and operations committee this past year).

2007-2008 Student Count: 24,268

Happy Birthday, Sputnik.
Fifty years ago, a small Soviet satellite was launched, stunning the U.S. and sparking a massive technology research effort. Could we be in for another "October surprise"?

Gary Anthes:

Quick, what's the most influential piece of hardware from the early days of computing? The IBM 360 mainframe? The DEC PDP-1 minicomputer? Maybe earlier computers such as Binac, ENIAC or Univac? Or, going way back to the 1800s, is it the Babbage Difference Engine?

More likely, it was a 183-pound aluminum sphere called Sputnik, Russian for "traveling companion." Fifty years ago, on Oct. 4, 1957, radio-transmitted beeps from the first man-made object to orbit the Earth stunned and frightened the U.S., and the country's reaction to the "October surprise" changed computing forever.

Although Sputnik fell from orbit just three months after launch, it marked the beginning of the Space Age, and in the U.S., it produced angst bordering on hysteria. Soon, there was talk of a U.S.-Soviet "missile gap." Then on Dec. 6, 1957, a Vanguard rocket that was to have carried aloft the first U.S. satellite exploded on the launch pad. The press dubbed the Vanguard "Kaputnik," and the public demanded that something be done.

The most immediate "something" was the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), a freewheeling Pentagon office created by President Eisenhower on Feb. 7, 1958. Its mission was to "prevent technological surprises," and in those first days, it was heavily weighted toward space programs.
Speaking of surprises, it might surprise some to learn that on the list of people who have most influenced the course of IT -- people with names like von Neumann, Watson, Hopper, Amdahl, Cerf, Gates and Berners-Lee -- appears the name J.C.R. Licklider, the first director of IT research at ARPA.

Armed with a big budget, carte blanche from his bosses and an unerring ability to attract bright people, Licklider catalyzed the invention of an astonishing array of IT, from time sharing to computer graphics to microprocessors to the Internet.

End, Don't Mend, No Child Left Behind

Neal McCluskey:

Congress has taken up renewal of the No Child Left Behind Act, with a major hearing in the House education committee. Unfortunately, despite little evidence that NCLB has done any good, there's no reason to believe Congress will improve it. After more than a century of industrial-era schooling, policy-makers are still unwilling to do what's necessary and turn public education on its head.

NCLB's results have been ambiguous at best. The most positive news has come from the Center on Education Policy, a Washington think tank, which found that scores on state tests have risen under NCLB. But CEP only had usable pre- and post-NCLB scores for 13 states and could do full analyses for only seven.

Nationally representative measures offer worse news: Improvements on National Assessment of Educational Progress math exams have slowed under NCLB, and reading outcomes have either stagnated or declined, depending on the grade.

These outcomes should be no surprise. The federal Institute for Education Sciences recently confirmed that states are in a race to the bottom on standards, setting them as low as possible so they're easy to hit. But that's just symptomatic of a more basic problem: No matter how revolutionary politicians say laws like NCLB are, they always preserve the same institutional structures we've had for more than a century, in which politicians and bureaucrats have all the power, and parents and children have none.

Bernanke: Education Is Best Investment

Jeannine Aversa:

Education is the best investment not only for workers but also for the economy in a time of continuing competitive strain, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Monday.

"Education - lifelong education for everyone - from toddlers to workers well advanced in their careers - is indeed an excellent investment for individuals and society as a whole," said Bernanke. He spent most of his professional life as a teacher and is married to one.

Economists have long recognized that the skills of the work force are an important source of economic growth, the Fed chairman said in a speech.

Although the United States has long been a leader in expanding educational opportunities, it also has long grappled with challenges such as troubling high-school dropout rates, particularly for minority and immigrant youths, as well as frustratingly slow and uneven progress in raising test scores, he said.

A UW-Madison education prof seeks middle school science teachers to participate in a professional development project.
Improving science teaching with hypertext support

Researcher: Sadhana Puntambekar
Email puntambekar@education.wisc.edu
Phone: (608) 262-0829
Link to site: www.compassproject.net/info

News context:
Science Magazine: The World of Undergraduate Education

Previous participants include:
Contacts:
Kelly Francour: kfrancou@marinette.k12.wi.us
Dana Gnesdilow: gnesdilow@wisc.edu

Hands-on science lab activities provide students with engaging ways to learn. But sometimes students don't fully learn the concepts behind what they're doing.

A hypertext computer environment being developed and field tested gives students graphical ways to practice learning and relating science concepts like 'force' and 'energy,' for example.

The program, called CoMPASS, helps ensure that hands-on construction activities leads to student understanding of the underlying deep science principles and phenomena.

UW-Madison education professor Sadhana Puntambekar points out that reading, writing, and communicating are an essential part of science instruction.

Research has pointed out the important role of language in science. Yet informational text is seldom used to complement hands-on activities in science classrooms.

This CoMPASS computer environment gives students a graphical, interactive, hypertext 'concept map' to help students visualize concepts and their relations. Navigating these 'concept maps' helps student make connections between abstract concepts, and to select text resources based on the relatedness of the documents to each other.

Eighth-grade students using the CoMPASS 'concept maps' performed better on essay question requiring depth. On a concept mapping test, students using CoMPASS made richer connections between concepts in their own maps (6th and 8th grades)

The CoMPASS environment helps teachers, too. It gives them another way to observe how well students learn.

The system is being used in inquiry-based curriculum units in sixth and eighth grade science classes. To date, CoMPASS has been used by over 1000 students in sixth and eighth grades in Wisconsin and Connecticut.

The CoMPASS project gives students better ways to find information related to their goals. The CoMPASS 'concept map' interface helps students navigate and learn using digital resources (illustration). A 'fisheye' view zooms in and out to help students clarify relationships between science concepts.

Middle school science teachers in and around Madison sign up for training and field testing CoMPASS because they get experience in teaching combined hands-on science with conceptual text-based support materials.
Participating in the project gives teachers more experience in curriculum design.
Teachers get more experience helping students establish connections between the questions students asked and the design challenge they were working on.
Teachers get more experience helping students connect new topics to their prior knowledge, and more experience in facilitating whole-class and small-group discussions.
Teachers can add to their resume that they've participated in a National Science Foundation-funded project.

Teachers who engage in the project receive support through the school year from graduate assistants with training in psychology, computer sciences, cognitive and learning sciences, or physics education.

Participating teacher Kelly Francour says that working with the project has made her focused on the best teaching practices. She uses inquiry-based instruction, and participating in the project has given her more strategies to use in the classroom. She says she now asks more higher-level-thinking questions during instruction.

Participating teacher Dana Gnesdilow says participating in the project has been worth the effort. 'There's a variety of benefits, including a huge amount of student engagement,' she says. 'Students like CoMPASS because it's hands-on and minds-on. Students take control of their own learning. It's a student-centered environment.' She says that benefits to teachers include professional development and a growing sense of confidence in 'teaching through inquiry.' Gnesdilow says, 'Teachers gain more content knowledge. Students have great questions and we explored their questions together.'

Name Paul Baker
E-mail: pbaker@wisc.edu
Telephone 608 263 8814

Busy Traffic, Children Create Danger Zones Outside Schools

Deborah Ziff:

For about seven minutes after the bell sounds the end of the school day at Thoreau elementary, chaos rules.

Children tumble out of the school in gleeful disorder and parents arrive to pick them up by car, foot or bike - all while traffic whizzes past on busy Nakoma Road.

At Thoreau, some parents park directly across from the school where they must make the treacherous journey across Nakoma, often with little ones in tow, without a crosswalk nearby.

"It's very frightening," said Thoreau Principal Elizabeth Fritz, "because the drivers of the cars aren't as careful as one would hope."

When teacher recruitment became a problem, Paul Perotti found the solution: cheap housing

Sam Whiting:

Ground will be broken this fall on a two-story 20-unit apartment community to go with the 40 units already standing on a surplus school property in Santa Clara. The groundbreaker is Paul Perotti, 58, former superintendent, and the housing is for teachers.

"I was superintendent of the Santa Clara Unified School District here from 1994 to 2005. I had this idea in about 1999.

At first my thought was 'well, everybody is talking about the high cost of living in this valley and there was an exodus of teachers migrating to the Central Valley. You could afford to live there. A lot of teachers were getting hired by us, getting trained and then leaving.

I wasted six months meeting with federal agencies in housing, local people in government, state people. If I played totally by their rules I didn't feel I could do what I needed to do. There were tons of restrictions. I decided to forget all that. Let's start thinking as if we're Intel and we're going to build a big new facility in Santa Clara, and we have no restrictions. The first thing was 'what's it going to cost us?' It was about $5.6 million. The land is free. The deal was it wouldn't cost the school district $1. We're going to pay for it with rent money.

I didn't want to do it unless we could charge 50 percent or less of the current market rate . Otherwise it wasn't significant. We did the numbers, checked them 100 times. We came up with $635 a month for a one-bedroom, when the going rate was $1,800. Our two-bedroom started out at $990 when they were going for $2,500.

Waukesha Teacher Compensation: Education over Experience

Amy Hetzner:

Nearly a decade after the School District started shifting its pay scale to emphasize education over experience, about one-third of Waukesha teachers are at the top of the school system's salary schedule.

More than 300 of 960 district teachers made $70,507 in 2006-'07, the highest salary available to teachers and other certified staff without picking up extra duties.

District officials are careful to point out that the compressed salary schedule, in which teachers can earn large pay boosts for reaching certain benchmarks in graduate and post-graduate education, doesn't cost the district more than a traditional schedule that pays based on a mixture of experience and education.

But because many of the teachers earning top pay also have seniority privileges protecting them from layoffs, the top-loaded pay system could cause problems as the district looks to more staff cuts to balance its budgets.

More at the Waukesha Taxpayer's League.

Joppatowne High School's Homeland Security Career Academy

Chris Colin:

Dedicated to everything from architecture to sports medicine, "career academies" claim to offer high school kids focus, relevancy, and solid job prospects. Now add a new kind of program to the list: homeland security high. In late August, Maryland's Joppatowne High School became the first school in the country dedicated to churning out would-be Jack Bauers. The 75 students in the Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness magnet program will study cybersecurity and geospatial intelligence, respond to mock terror attacks, and receive limited security clearances at the nearby Army chemical warfare lab.

The new school is funded and guided by a slew of federal, state, and local agencies, not to mention several defense firms. Officials say it will teach kids to understand the "new reality," though they hasten to add that the school isn't focused just on terrorism. School administrators, channeling Cheneyesque secrecy, refused to be interviewed for this story. But it's no secret that the program is seen as a model for the rest of the country, with the Pentagon and other agencies watching closely.

Students will choose one of three specialized tracks: information and communication technology, criminal justice and law enforcement, or "homeland security science." David Volrath, executive director of secondary education for Harford County Public Schools, says the school also hopes to offer "Arabic or some other nontraditional, Third World-type language."

Writers' Rooms

The Guardian:

The Guardian has an extensive list of writers and the rooms in which they write (with photos and descriptions by the authors).

"PROXIMITY is not destiny, educationally speaking"

Joanne Jacobs:

A generation of experience with racial integration has taught a clear lesson: Sitting black kids next to white kids in school is not a silver bullet that zaps unequal achievement.

However, the faith that proximity leads to equal achievement remains the cargo cult of education. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court barred school assignments based on race to increase racial diversity. So school leaders immediately began considering economic integration plans instead.

Sit poor kids next to middle-class kids. That should work!

Presidential candidate John Edwards - Mr. Two Americas - has made this the core of his education proposals. He promises "a million housing vouchers" over five years to move poor kids to better schools in the `burbs plus $200 million to create magnet schools that will lure affluent kids to inner-city schools.

The magnet school scheme was tried from 1985 to 1997 in Kansas City, Mo., at a cost of $2billion. To lure suburban white students, Kansas City's inner-city schools were equipped with lavish facilities: Indoor pools, gymnasia, high-tech science labs, computers, etc. But programs designed for the needs and interests of middle-class white suburbanites did not serve inner-city blacks. And few suburban students were willing to commute to city schools for a luxury athletic complex or a classics magnet. Test scores remained dreadful. By 1997, the district actually had a smaller percentage of white students than when the plan started.

Well, what about moving poor kids to better schools?

Much more on Kansas City here.

www.coleschoolcast.org

In an effort to keep people informed of my activities on the Madison School Board, and to encourage people to participate in school-related activities, I have started a podcast, which I am calling the Maya Cole Schoolcast. You can find it at www.coleschoolcast.org. You can also subscribe to the podcast with iTunes or any other podcast software. You can find it by searching the podcast directory for Maya Cole.

Please feel free to give me your comments and suggestions. This edition includes a discussion with several Madison Alders regarding safe walk to school among other topics.

Madison schools' lunch period isn't what it used to be

Andy Hall:

And somehow, in a time window one third the size that many adults take for lunch, 215 young children crowd around picnic-style tables, consume chicken nuggets — or whatever they brought from home — and hustle outside to play.

Squeezed by tight school budgets, the federal No Child Left Behind law and Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction rules on instructional time, the school lunch period isn't what it used to be in many school districts.

ver the years," said Frank Kelly, food services director of the Madison School District, who estimates that overall, school lunch periods in the district have been trimmed about 10 minutes over the past 10 years.

"I don't think people are going to accept anything less than this."

In fact, in response to complaints from parents four years ago, Madison officials eased the lunch crunch a bit for elementary students by using the last five minutes of the class period before lunch to move students to the cafeteria.

There was talk four years ago of expanding the elementary lunch period to 35 minutes. But the idea was dropped after officials estimated it might cost more than $2 million to pay teachers and lunch supervisors.

"We don't have much flexibility in extending that," said Sue Abplanalp, an assistant superintendent who oversees Madison's elementary schools.

While DPI leaves it up to local officials to determine the length of lunch periods, Madison educators say they believe they attain a decent compromise by giving:

•Elementary students 20 minutes.

•Middle school students 30 to 34 minutes.

•High school students about 35 minutes (except at West High School, where most students get 55 minutes under a plan initiated last year).

Those schedules are typical of what's found around Wisconsin, said Kelly, who has worked in food service for 31 years.

"For most of our people, it works very well," Madison schools Superintendent Art Rainwater said.

A Beloved Professor Delivers the Lecture of a Lifetime

Moving On
Jeff Zaslow
Wall Street Journal
September 20, 2007

Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon University computer-science professor, was about to give a lecture Tuesday afternoon, but before he said a word, he received a standing ovation from 400 students and colleagues.

He motioned to them to sit down. "Make me earn it," he said.
What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance? For Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch, the question isn't rhetorical -- he's dying of cancer. Jeff Zaslow narrates a video on Prof. Pausch's final lecture.

They had come to see him give what was billed as his "last lecture." This is a common title for talks on college campuses today. Schools such as Stanford and the University of Alabama have mounted "Last Lecture Series," in which top professors are asked to think deeply about what matters to them and to give hypothetical final talks. For the audience, the question to be mulled is this: What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance?

It can be an intriguing hour, watching healthy professors consider their demise and ruminate over subjects dear to them. At the University of Northern Iowa, instructor Penny O'Connor recently titled her lecture "Get Over Yourself." At Cornell, Ellis Hanson, who teaches a course titled "Desire," spoke about sex and technology.

At Carnegie Mellon, however, Dr. Pausch's speech was more than just an academic exercise. The 46-year-old father of three has pancreatic cancer and expects to live for just a few months. His lecture, using images on a giant screen, turned out to be a rollicking and riveting journey through the lessons of his life.

He began by showing his CT scans, revealing 10 tumors on his liver. But after that, he talked about living. If anyone expected him to be morose, he said, "I'm sorry to disappoint you." He then dropped to the floor and did one-handed pushups.
[photo]
Randy Pausch and his three children, ages 5, 2 and 1.

Clicking through photos of himself as a boy, he talked about his childhood dreams: to win giant stuffed animals at carnivals, to walk in zero gravity, to design Disney rides, to write a World Book entry. By adulthood, he had achieved each goal. As proof, he had students carry out all the huge stuffed animals he'd won in his life, which he gave to audience members. After all, he doesn't need them anymore.

He paid tribute to his techie background. "I've experienced a deathbed conversion," he said, smiling. "I just bought a Macintosh." Flashing his rejection letters on the screen, he talked about setbacks in his career, repeating: "Brick walls are there for a reason. They let us prove how badly we want things." He encouraged us to be patient with others. "Wait long enough, and people will surprise and impress you." After showing photos of his childhood bedroom, decorated with mathematical notations he'd drawn on the walls, he said: "If your kids want to paint their bedrooms, as a favor to me, let 'em do it."

While displaying photos of his bosses and students over the years, he said that helping others fulfill their dreams is even more fun than achieving your own. He talked of requiring his students to create videogames without sex and violence. "You'd be surprised how many 19-year-old boys run out of ideas when you take those possibilities away," he said, but they all rose to the challenge.

He also saluted his parents, who let him make his childhood bedroom his domain, even if his wall etchings hurt the home's resale value. He knew his mom was proud of him when he got his Ph.D, he said, despite how she'd introduce him: "This is my son. He's a doctor, but not the kind who helps people."

He then spoke about his legacy. Considered one of the nation's foremost teachers of videogame and virtual-reality technology, he helped develop "Alice," a Carnegie Mellon software project that allows people to easily create 3-D animations. It had one million downloads in the past year, and usage is expected to soar.

"Like Moses, I get to see the Promised Land, but I don't get to step foot in it," Dr. Pausch said. "That's OK. I will live on in Alice."

Many people have given last speeches without realizing it. The day before he was killed, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke prophetically: "Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place." He talked of how he had seen the Promised Land, even though "I may not get there with you."

Dr. Pausch's lecture, in the same way, became a call to his colleagues and students to go on without him and do great things. But he was also addressing those closer to his heart.

Near the end of his talk, he had a cake brought out for his wife, whose birthday was the day before. As she cried and they embraced on stage, the audience sang "Happy Birthday," many wiping away their own tears.

Dr. Pausch's speech was taped so his children, ages 5, 2 and 1, can watch it when they're older. His last words in his last lecture were simple: "This was for my kids." Then those of us in the audience rose for one last standing ovation.

Write to Jeffrey Zaslow at jeffrey.zaslow@wsj.com

Waukesha Schools' Health Care Savings

Amy Hetzner:

As it continues to negotiate contracts with eight employee groups, the School Board has approved health insurance changes and modest salary increases that are expected to reduce overall compensation costs for non-unionized employees this school year.

Other employees will hopefully take note, School Board President William Baumgart said.

"This was a small group of people in comparison to the total district," Baumgart said of the approximately 70 administrators, secretaries and technical staff covered by the settlement. "We feel if we're going to put emphasis on saving money in employee costs, we're going to have to do it at all levels. And this will be the first one."

Under the one-year settlement the School Board approved last week, non-unionized employees will pay higher deductibles, office co-payments and drug costs for their health care. They also will continue to pay 5% of their health insurance premiums.

Salaries will increase by 2% this school year for the pool, except for assistant principals who will receive a 1% pay boost. Overall, the changes are expected to reduce costs for covered employees by 0.63%, or $31,647, less than what the district spent last school year, said Erik Kass, executive director of business services for the district.

Locally, health care costs [RSS] have been a topic of much discussion and controversy.

Civic Literacy Report

Intercollegiate Studies Institute:

• College Seniors Failed a Basic Test on America's History and Institutions.
• Colleges Stall Student Learning about America.
• America's Most Prestigious Universities Performed the Worst.
• Inadequate College Curriculum Contributes to Failure.
• Greater Learning about America Goes Hand-in-Hand with More Active Citizenship.

Anita Weier has more, along with Tracey Wong Briggs:

Students don't know much about history, and colleges aren't adding enough to their civic literacy, says a report out today.
The study from the non-profit Intercollegiate Studies Institute shows that less than half of college seniors knew that Yorktown was the battle that ended the American Revolution or that NATO was formed to resist Soviet expansion. Overall, freshmen averaged 50.4% on a wide-ranging civic literacy test; seniors averaged 54.2%, both failing scores if translated to grades.

"One of the things our research demonstrates conclusively is that an increase in what we call civic knowledge almost invariably leads to a use of that knowledge in a beneficial way," says Josiah Bunting, chairman of ISI's National Civic Literacy Board. "This is useful knowledge we are talking about."

Michelle Rhee on the Washington, DC School System

Video:

It may not be Cornell '77, but here and just below (part 1) and here and the second video below (part 2) are videos of a speech Michelle Rhee gave the other night discussing the state of affairs in Washington, D.C. that are well worth checking out. If you want the inside view of the challenges there and the ones facing urban schools more generally, you can't do much better than this. I keep hearing how there is nothing to any of these issues reformers keep raising...starting to think maybe I'm being snowed...See also this Richard Whitmire post:

The surprise star at last night's launch of the Democrats For Education Reform was Michelle Rhee, the new DC schools chancellor. With her humor and spunk very much intact in spite of smacking repeatedly against what may be the worst-run school central office in the entire country, Rhee regaled a crowd of about 100 national education reformers at the Hotel Washington across from the U.S. Treasury Department with fresh stories from close quarters bureaucratic combat.

Jesse Jackson, Jr. On School Choice

Democrats for Education Reform:

But the times seem to have changed a bit. At Monday's night's DFER DC launch at the Hotel Washington, Jackson seemed to be embracing what I like to call the Anti-Crappy Schools Doctrine. Forget whether a school is a traditional public school, or a charter school, or private school - how do we make sure every kid in America is able to attend a GOOD school?

Nearly a decade after the Milwaukee rally, Jackson Jr. was talking about "alarming dropout rates" the dangers of a "monopoly" filled with failing schools, etc. He was suggesting that every American child be entitled to a good public education "or charter education or whatever kind of education we can to produce the kind of Americans that we'll all be proud of in the future."

With the Washington Monument to his left, Jackson Jr. was highlighting the fact that his own parents sought the best for him by sending him to the elite St. Albans Episcopal School in DC as a kid. He talked about "pushing the envelope to make the majority party in this country" approach education with a more open mind.

"We must explore options," Jackson Jr. said. "Every option for every American child so that every child might have the high-quality education they deserve in their lifetime."

"We need more competition in the system."

U.S. Set to Offer Math Grants Modeled on Reading First

Sean Cavanagh:

A year and a half ago, President Bush proposed the creation of a new federal mathematics effort that would offer millions of dollars in grants to school districts to adopt proven strategies for improving classroom instruction in that subject.

Last month, federal lawmakers gave the president what he was looking for—with some differences.

Administration officials had pictured the new program, called Math Now, as being modeled on Reading First, the $1 billion-a-year federal effort that provides money for research-based improvements in reading instruction in the early grades.

But in the end, Congress’ vision differed. Math Now—included as part of a broader piece of legislation to support math and science education and research known as the America COMPETES Act, which Mr. Bush signed into law Aug. 9—is authorized to receive less half the amount the administration had wanted: $95 million a year, not $250 million.

City Audit Finds Underreporting of School Violence

Randi Weingarten:

[Editor’s note: City Comptroller William C. Thompson, Jr. released an audit on Sept. 19 that found that many safety incidents in New York City public schools are not being reported as required under state law. For the 10 large high schools audited, 21 percent of the sampled incidents were not reported, including 14 percent of those incidents deemed serious.]

While we know the mayor and the chancellor want schools to be safe, this audit confirms a practice educators and the UFT have complained about for years: the failure to report all school incidents. Now with data driving all education decision-making, this audit couldn’t have come at a more important time.

"Politically Correct Trumps Substance Every Time"

Paul Soglin on Why the Prospects for Madison are so Bleak, Part II:

"Struck by the number of residents who said if things don't improve soon, they'll consider moving elsewhere." Good grief. Its been going on for over a decade and really picked up around 2000. The school enrollment figures clearly show that. And go look at the private schools, bulging at the seams, for confirmation.

That's OK. This is Madison. All is forgiven. Throw a good party on State Street, recycle a few beer cans, vote to impech Bush-Cheney, and it does not matter that we are losing the city.

Politically correct trumps substance every time.

Related: Barb Schrank on "Where have all the Students Gone?":

MMSD Lost 174 Students While the Surrounding School Districts Increased by 1,462 Students Over Four School Years. Revenue Value of 1,462 Students - $13.16 Million Per Year*

City, School District get $9 million windfall

Andy Hall:

An unprecedented windfall is on the horizon for the city of Madison and Madison School District, promising to relieve some budget pressures and affect major issues such as the city 's hiring of 30 police officers and the School Board 's debate over whether it still needs to ask voters for more money in a referendum.

Under a proposal from Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz, the city would receive $3.7 million and the School District would get $5.4 million in money flowing from two fast-developing special taxing districts created years ago by the city. In addition, Dane County and Madison Area Technical College would receive a little less than $1 million apiece.

"It 's significant news, and very good news, for the School District and the city, " Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz said Wednesday. "The amount is unprecedented. "

The one-time payouts would occur by the end of next year if the City Council votes to close the two tax incremental financing districts as recommended by city staff members who say the move is necessary under state law.

New Study of Teacher Hiring Policies in Milwaukee Shows Success of School-based Hiring, But Forced Placements Still Hamper Efforts to Attract and Retain Quality Teachers

The New Teacher Project:

According to a NEW STUDY, the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) and the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association (MTEA) have made great strides in their joint efforts to create a more effective teacher hiring and evaluation model. However, the school system’s current school staffing and teacher transfer practices continue to cause dissatisfaction among many teachers. The study, conducted by The New Teacher Project (TNTP), a national non-profit organization dedicated to the improvement of teacher quality in America’s public schools, indicated that such shortcomings hamper Milwaukee’s efforts to build, support, and retain a high-quality teaching force, especially in its highest-need schools.

The New Teacher Project’s extensive study was funded by the Joyce Foundation and conducted with the cooperation of both MPS and the MTEA. TNTP staff conducted a briefing for members of the Milwaukee Board of School Directors at last night’s public meeting. The scope of the study included a detailed survey that drew over 2,000 responses from 5,000 MPS teachers, a survey of MPS principals, an in-depth examination of the MTEA contract with MPS, and interviews with school principals and district administrators. The organization’s final analysis shows that:

Alan Borsuk has more.

Sugar Finds Its Way Back to the School Cafeteria

Andrew Martin:

STUNG by harsh publicity about fat kids and threatened with lawsuits, the nation’s three largest beverage companies finally got some love last year when they voluntarily agreed to remove sugary drinks from schools.

In the place of soda and sugar-laden beverages, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Cadbury Schweppes agreed that only water, low-fat milk and 100 percent juice would be offered in elementary and middle schools. In high schools, sports drinks, light juices and diet drinks would also be allowed.

The announcement was brokered by the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, a collaboration of the American Heart Association and the William J. Clinton Foundation, and it was widely praised. Former President Bill Clinton, who attended the press conference, called the decision “courageous.”

“Shrewd” was probably a better word.

Cherokee Middle School's Back to School Night

I enjoyed a wonderful 90 minutes at Madison's Cherokee Middle School this evening. The teachers presented course materials and discussed student (and parent) expectations. I particularly appreciated the loudspeaker announcements when it was time to change classrooms and begin a new period. Reminded me of my school days decades ago. Karen Seno runs a great school.

Madison's Superintendent Search: Public Input

The public has an opportunitiy to provide input regarding qualities sought for the new Superintendent:

• 9/19/2007; 7:00p.m. at Memorial High School (Auditorium) [Map]
• 9/20/2007; 7:00p.m. La Follette High School (Auditorium) [Map]

I passed along a few general thoughts earlier today:

• Candor
  An organization's forthrightness and philosophy is set from the top.
  I cited examples including: the past method of discussing referendum costs without the effect of negative aid (reduction in state aids that requires increased local property taxes), parsing math and reading test results, structural deficits and collecting data on new initiatives to determine their validity and utility [RSS]. Public/Taxpayer confidence in our $340M+ school district is critical to successful future referendums.
• Interact with our rich community
  Madison offers an unprecedented financial and intellectual environment for someone willing to seize the opportunity.
• Raise academic expectations via a substantive, world class curriculum
  We do our students no favors by watering down curricular quality.

Susan Troller has more.

Kobza's exit is a serious matter

A Capital Times Editorial:

The decision of Madison School Board member Lawrie Kobza not to seek a second term, while anticipated, is both significant and troubling.

Along with veteran Carol Carstensen, who will also step down after next April's election, Kobza is a School Board member who has seriously embraced the difficult work of budgeting.

Since her election three years ago, Kobza has meticulously studied the intricate process by which the school district shapes it complex spending plans. A successful lawyer with a young family and multiple civic responsibilities, she nonetheless has carved time out of her weekly schedule to meet with experts on budgeting at the district's Dayton Street headquarters and with independent analysts.

When Carstensen announced that she was stepping down after serving the better part of two decades on the board, the hope was that Kobza would fill the gap created by the loss of the body's most serious player in the budget process.

That won't happen. Kobza's legitimate frustration with the way the board has operated combined with personal and professional demands to make her decide against seeking re-election.

Shabaz Allows Trial For Whistle-blower

Kevin Murphy:

A jury will get to decide if a Madison Metropolitan School District employee speaking out about alleged bid-rigging cost her a promotion, a federal judge ruled.

Linda Martin had worked in the district's transportation office since 1989, but was passed over in November 2002 for the newly created position of transportation coordinator. A month later, Martin was transferred to the accounting department as her transportation clerk's job was eliminated.

Although the school district contends Martin wasn't qualified for the coordinator's job, that argument is contradicted by the district's interviewing her for the position, according to U.S. District Judge John Shabaz's decision issued Thursday. It also is under dispute whether the district's choice, Jeff Fedler, was more qualified than Martin.

Fedler had worked for a school bus vendor, First Student, formerly Verona Bus, before being recommended in May 2002 by Martin's supervisor, Rene Bremer, for the job Martin was seeking.

OECD Criticizes Waste in Education Spending

Jon Boone:

Much of the global boom in spending on schools has been wasted by governments who have poured money into unreformed education systems, a report by the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development said on Tuesday.

Wastage is so great that the results currently achieved by the world's pupils could be achieved with 30 per cent less finance if better teaching techniques were introduced and more efficient ways of running schools developed.

On the other hand, if resource levels were maintained, education systems could improve their results by 22 per cent if all education institutions performed at the same level of efficiency as the world's most efficient schools.

The annual Education at a Glance Report said that of all the 24 countries surveyed the US and Italy were getting the most disappointing results out of their schools despite spending some of the largest amounts on their students.

Australia, Canada and Japan were among the countries that performed more strongly than might have been expected from their level of investment in schools, when the data was corrected to take into account differences in class background.

The US is the second highest spender on educational institutions in the OECD, but only a comparatively small proportion of those resources "reach the classroom”, according to Andreas Schleicher, head of the OECD's education analysis department.

However, the biggest spenders do not get the best outcomes. For example, Korea and the Netherlands have some of the most-able 15 year-olds in the world, according to international tests of their aptitude in maths, science and reading, despite having cumulative education expenditure below the OECD average.

The report said productivity in education has generally declined in recent years "because the quality of schooling has broadly remained constant, while the price of inputs has markedly increased”.

Unlike other professions, the report said, the education sector has not "reinvented itself” to improve outcomes and productivity. Instead, it has remained labour intensive and teachers' salaries tend to rise simply according to length of service and qualifications held.

Other factors responsible for the different outcomes include how many hours teaching pupils receive and the number of layers of management in a school system.

OECD:

cross OECD countries, governments are seeking policies to make education more effective while searching for additional resources to meet the increasing demand for education.

The 2007 edition of Education at a Glance enables countries to see themselves in the light of other countries' performance. It provides a rich, comparable and up-to-date array of indicators on the performance of education systems. The indicators look at who participates in education, what is spent on it and how education systems operate and at the results achieved. The latter includes indicators on a wide range of outcomes, from comparisons of student's performance in key subject areas to the impact of education on earnings and on adults' chances of employment.

The ExcelTM spreadsheets used to create the tables and charts are available via the StatLinks printed in Education at a Glance.

The Changing Racial and Ethnic Composition of U.S. Public Schools

Rick Fry:

The 5-4 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in June to strike down school desegregation plans in Seattle and Louisville has focused public attention on the degree of racial and ethnic integration in the nation's 93,845 public schools. A new analysis of public school enrollment data by the Pew Hispanic Center finds that in the dozen years from 1993-94 to 2005-06, white students became less isolated from minority students while, at the same time, black and Hispanic students became slightly more isolated from white students.