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Mark H. Ingraham Dean Emeritus, College of Letters & Science, University of Wisconsin
Professor Emeritus of Mathematics, University of Wisconsin [Click to view this 23MB PDF "book"]:
ContentsThanks to Richard Askey for extensive assistance with this digitized book. Clusty Search Mark Ingraham.Preface
Part I Liberal Education
The Omnivorous Mind 3
Given May 16, 1962, to the University of Wisconsin Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. Republished from The Speech Teacher of September 1962.Truth-An Insufficient Goal 17
The Keniston Lecture for 1964 at the University of Michi- gan; March 17, 1964. Republished from the Michigan Quarterly Review of July 1964.On the Adjective "Common" 31
An editorial for the February 1967 Review of the Wisconsin Academy of Arts, Letters, and Sciences, February 23, 1967.Part II Educational Policy
Super Sleep-A Form of Academic Somnambulism 37
First given as retiring address as President of A.A. U.P . This much revised version was given to the Madison Literary Club, March 12, 1940.No, We Can't; He Has a Committee Meeting 57
Madison Literary Club; May 11, 1953.Is There a Heaven and a Hell for Colleges? 70
Commencement address, Hiram College; June 8, 1958.The College of Letters and Science 79
Talk given to the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin, May 3, 1958.Some Half Truths About the American Undergraduate 84
Orientation conference for Whitney-Fulbright Visiting Scholars. Sarah Lawrence College, September 6, 1962.Maps Versus Blueprints 94
Honors Convocation, University of Wisconsin, May 18, 1973.
Part III To Students
A Talk to Freshmen 103
University of Wisconsin; September 18, 1951Choice: The Limitation and the Expression of Freedom 112
Honors Convocation, University of Wisconsin; June 17, 1955. Republished from the Wisconsin Alumnus."The Good is Oft Interred with Their Bones" 121
Commencement, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh; Janu- ary 19, 1968.
Talk at Honors Convocation at Ripon CollegeTalk at Honors Convocation at Ripon College 129
April 9, 1969The Framework of Opportunity 136
Thanksgiving Address, University of Wisconsin; November, 1947
Part IV A Little Fun
Food from a Masculine Point of View 149
Madison Literary Club; November 11, 1946On Telling and Reading Stories to Children 165
Attic Angel Tower, Madison, Wisconsin; March 6, 1978Three Limericks 179
Fragments 181
a. From an address given to the University oF Wyoming Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, April 26, 1965b. A comment
Part V Somewhat Personal
Letter of Resignation from Deanship 185
April 5, 1961Retirement Dinner Talk 188
May 24, 1966
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via a kind reader's email: Parent Diane Harrington:
Dear Board Members, Dr. Nerad, and Madison Alders,Parent Lorie Raihala:My 11-year-old and I visited John Muir Elementary for basketball practice one recent evening. Their gym has banners noting that for several years they've been named a "School of Excellence."
Ben's school, Orchard Ridge Elementary, had just been dubbed a "School of Promise."
Which school would YOU rather go to?
But Ben didn't need a marketing effort to tell him which school was which; he knows some John Muir kids. Ben, too, would like to go to a school where kids are expected to learn and to behave instead of just encouraged to.
Just like those banners, the very idea of your upcoming, $86,000 "branding" effort isn't fooling anyone.
You don't need to improve your image. You need to improve your schools.
Stop condescending to children, to parents and to the public. Skip the silly labels and the PR plans.
Instead, just do your #^%* job. (If you need help filling in that blank, head to ORE or Toki. Plenty of kids - some as young as kindergarten - use several colorful words in the hallways, classrooms, lunchroom and playground without even a second look, much less disciplinary action, from a teacher or principal.)
Create an environment that strives for excellence, not mediocrity. Guide children to go above and beyond, rather than considering your job done once they've met the minimum requirements.
Until then, it's all too obvious that any effort to "cultivate relationships with community partners" is just what you're branding it: marketing. It's just about as meaningless as that "promise" label on ORE or the "honor roll" that my 13-year-old and half the Toki seventh graders are on.
P.S. At my neighborhood association's annual Winter Social earlier tonight, one parent of a soon-to-be-elementary-age child begged me to tell him there was some way to get a voucher so he could avoid sending his daughter to ORE. His family can't afford private school. Another parent told me her soon-to-be-elementary-age kids definitely (whew!) were going to St. Maria Goretti instead of ORE. A friend - even though her son was finishing up at ORE this year - pulled her daughter out after kindergarten (yes, to send her to Goretti), because the atmosphere at ORE is just too destructive and her child wasn't learning anything. These people aren't going to be fooled by a branding effort. And you're only fooling yourselves (and wasting taxpayer money) if you think otherwise.
Regarding the Madison School District's $86,000 "branding campaign," recent polls have surveyed the many families who have left the district for private schools, virtual academies, home schooling or open enrollment in other districts.
Public schools are tuition free and close to home, so why have these parents chosen more expensive, less convenient options? The survey results are clear: because Madison schools have disregarded their children's learning needs.Top issues mentioned include a lack of challenging academics and out-of-control behavior problems. Families are leaving because of real experience in the schools, not "bad press" or "street corner stories."
How will the district brand that?
Lorie Raihala Madison
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Foundation for Excellence in Education:
High academic standards: High academic standards are based on the principle that all students can learn. Raising expectations for what students are required to learn in the classroom will better prepare students for success. Standards in core subjects must be raised to meet international benchmarks to ensure American students can compete with their peers around the globe.Tom Vander Ark has more.Standardized measurement: To provide an accurate depiction of where our students are, annual standardized testing must be continued and expanded in all 50 states. Measuring whether students are learning a year's worth of knowledge in a year's time is essential for building on progress, rewarding success and correcting failures. To accurately measure progress, modern data and information systems should be utilized, and there must be maximum transparency across the board.
Data-driven accountability: Holding schools accountable for student achievement - measured objectively with data such as annual standardized tests and graduation rates - improves the quality of an education system. Success and learning gains no longer go unnoticed and problems are no longer ignored, resulting in efforts to effectively narrow achievement gaps.
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Standing outside a snow-covered garden at Nature's Classroom Institute, teacher Dave Oyama poses a question to the group of bundled-up elementary-school children from Milwaukee:"Though it's not in use right now, this garden is organic. Does anyone know what organic means?"
Brows furrow. A few mittens go up. One child guesses "healthy." Another thinks the word means "whole grains."
On their second day at the Nature's Classroom Institute, a residential environmental science school near Mukwonago, the children from Craig Montessori School are in the middle of a lesson that looks different than their traditional classroom work in the city.
As members of a pilot project between Milwaukee Public Schools and the nonprofit institute, the 25 students from Craig are the first from MPS to stay at the facility on 600 picturesque acres in northeastern Walworth County.
The students' tuition from Feb. 16-19 was funded by an anonymous $6,000 grant from a Chicago donor, but organizers hope that the pilot will prompt fund raising to allow more city students to participate next years.
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If they hadn't been mostly shut out of bids to run a slew of new L.A. Unified campuses, the groups might have demonstrated how they handle students with challenging needs.Los Angeles school officials lost a chance this week to test whether the booming charter movement can take on all the problems of the district's traditional, and often troubled, schools.
On Tuesday, the Board of Education denied proposals from three major charter organizations that had sought to run newly built neighborhood schools, which would have included substantial numbers of limited-English speakers, special education students, foster children and low-income families.
That is exactly the population that charter schools have been criticized for not sufficiently reaching.
Charters are independently managed and exempt from some rules that govern traditional schools. They're also schools of choice -- campuses that parents seek and select. And researchers have found that charters enroll fewer students with more challenging, and often more expensive, needs.
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Virginia officials are moving to sharply limit an alternative testing program that many schools in the Washington suburbs use to measure the abilities of special education students who traditionally have fared poorly on the state's Standards of Learning exams.The effort by state lawmakers and education officials targets "portfolio" tests, which have helped increase passing rates at many schools by allowing students to avoid the multiple choice tests in favor of more flexible, individually tailored assessments. Critics have said that the alternative tests undermine Virginia's widely praised accountability system and overstate the progress districts are making in closing achievement gaps between racial groups.
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Holly Otterbein
In this week's A Million Stories, we explored the messy Webcam scandal that's going down at Lower Merion School District. The district insists that it only peered through students' Webcams in order to find lost or stolen laptops, and did so using a security software called LANrev. Insanely enough, Douglas Young, the district's spokesperson, told us that it wasn't the only school district using such software: "The software feature isn't just utilized in this school district," says Young. "It's utilized by other school districts and organizations." (He said he couldn't name any offhand.)
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For those who believe that performance pay and charter schools pose a threat to public education and that a cult of testing and accountability has hijacked school reform, an unlikely national spokeswoman has emerged.Diane Ravitch, an education historian, now renounces many of the market-oriented policies she promoted as a former federal education official with close ties to Democrats and Republicans. In large part because of her change of heart, Ravitch's critique of the reform ideas that prevail in government, philanthropies and think tanks is reverberating in the world of education.
"In choosing his education agenda, President Obama sided with the economists and the corporate-style reformers," Ravitch writes in her book "The Death and Life of the Great American School System," circulating in advance of its general release Tuesday.
She stoutly defends teachers unions, questions the value of standardized test data and calls the president's affinity for independently operated charter schools "puzzling."
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Inessa Volkonidina had taken precalculus once and dropped it. She needed to take it again, and quickly, to fulfill a graduation requirement at Long Island University. She went online and found a company with an odd name, StraighterLine, that offered the course on even odder terms: $99 a month.She thought it might be a scam. But StraighterLine, based in Alexandria, is a serious education company and a force that could disrupt half a millennium of higher-education tradition. The site offers students as many general-education courses as they care to take for a flat monthly fee, plus $39 per course. As college tuitions go, it is more on the scale of a cable bill.
The courses, standard freshman fare such as algebra, are cash cows for traditional schools, taught to students by the hundreds in vast lecture halls. They generate handsome profits to support more costly operations on campus.
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Last night's Panel for Educational Policy meeting was the second in as many months to be packed to the gills with parents and teachers passionately pleading their case.But this time it was charter school parents, not teachers and parents at closing district schools, who drove to the meeting in busloads.
"What we are pleading for this evening is space," Trevor Alfred, a parent at Explore Empower Charter School, told the panel. "We deserve it."
At first blush, the level of passion, and sometimes anger, directed towards the panel could seem odd. Although 16 school space proposals were up for a vote, the board had never voted down a city proposal, and none of the charter school proposals on the agenda yesterday was defeated.
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Josephine Norwood, a Bronzeville mother of three Chicago public school students, has rebounded from two rounds of school closings that displaced her children from their schools. As she watched the Board of Education approve another set of schools for closing or turnaround last week, Mrs. Norwood had a simple question: Can Chicago Public Schools officials promise that the new schools will be better?"If this process could guarantee the child the best and they would benefit from the school closing, then maybe it is a positive thing," Mrs. Norwood said. But she spoke out last week, along with many others, about the need for more transparency and proof that the disruptions are warranted.
As the public schools system entered its annual process of selecting schools for closing or turnarounds, parents, teachers and community groups leveled criticism at school officials for the lack of communication with the communities involved and questioned data from the central office that does not match the reality in the schools. Some also pleaded for the district to delay any action until the corrective measures taken at the lowest-performing schools -- the wholesale turnover of administrators and teachers -- could be better evaluated and a comprehensive plan for school facilities could be developed by a new task force.
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"Star Wars," Legos and an interest in word origins combined to prepare Vishal Narayanaswamy to become the 2010 Madison All-City Spelling Bee champion Saturday.The 12-year-old from Jefferson Middle School rose to the top of a field of about 50 third- through eighth-graders during the competition on the Edgewood College campus.
Vishal clinched the win, and a trip to the Badger State Spelling Bee, by spelling "apparatchik," a word of Russian origin meaning communist secret agent.
He wasn't sure about the word's meaning, but while studying for the competition he memorized the first four letters by remembering they were the same as the Tamil Indian word for "father."
"And it sounded Slavic so I knew it had a 'k' at the end," Vishal said. "I usually don't hear the meanings. I just remember word patterns."
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Technology director Bill Herman has migrated the district's email over to Google. Our new email addresses are firstname.lastname@mgschools.net. You can still continue to use the old addresses so the change should be transparent from the outside. The change is motivated by a desire to provide a more reliable system with less maintenance and support.A few related links:
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Superintendent Dan Nerad, via an Arlene Silveira email 1.4MB PDF:
Processes of the AdministrationThe following administrative processes are currently being utilized to provide administrative leadership within the district:
- Superintendent's Management Team Comprised of the Superintendent and department administrators, this team meets weekly and serves as the major decision making body of the administration.
- Strategic Plan Monitoring and Support
The Superintendent meets monthly with administrators with lead responsibility for the five priority strategies within the Strategic Plan.- Superintendents-Assistant Superintendents, Chief of Staff and Executive Director, Human Resources
The Superintendent meets weekly with the Assistant Superintendents, Chief of Staff and Executive Director of Human Resources to discuss key operational issues.- Board Liaison Team
The Board Liaison Team, consisting of designated administrators, meets three times a month to coordinate Board agenda planning and preparation. District Learning Council The District Learning Council consists of curriculum, instruction and assessment related administrators and teacher leaders. This council meets bi-weekly to discuss major instructional issues in the district and provides coordination across related departments.- Department Meetings Administrators assigned to each department meet as needed.
- Principal Meetings Assistant Superintendents meet minimally one time per month with all principals
- Committee Meetings
There are numerous administrative/staff committees that meet as specific tasks require.General Strengths of the Current Administrative Structure
The strengths of the current administrative structure within the district are as follows:
- The basic structure of our district has been in place for many years. As a result, the current department structure is known by many and has predictable ways of operating.
There exist needed checks and balances within the current system, given the relative equal status of the departments, with each department leader along with the Assistant Superintendents and Chief of Staff directly reporting to the Superintendent of Schools.
General Weaknesses of the Current Administrative Structure
The weaknesses of the current administrative structure within the district are as follows:Organizational Principles
- The degree to which the mission-work of the district, teaching and learning, is central to the function of administration is of concern especially in the way professional development is addressed without a departmental focus.
- Traditional organizational structures, while having a degree of predictability, can become bureaucratically laden and can lack inventiveness and the means to encourage participation in decision making.
In addition to the mission, belief statements and parameters, the following organizational principles serve as a guide for reviewing and defining the administrative structure and administrative processes within the district.Leadership Needs
- The district will be organized in a manner to best serve the mission of the district .and to support key district strategies to accomplish the mission.
- Leadership decisions will be filtered through the lens of our mission.
- Central service functions will be organized to support teaching and learning at the schools and should foster supportive relationships between schools and central service functions.
- The district's organizational structure must have coherence on a preK-12 basis and must address the successful transition of students within the district.
- The district will be structured to maximize inter-division and intra-division collaboration and cooperation.
- The district's organizational structure must have an orientation toward being of service to stakeholders, internally and externally.
- The district must be organized in a manner that allows for ongoing public engagement
and stakeholder input.- To meet the district's mission, the district will embrace the principles of learning organizations, effective schools, participative and distributive leadership and teamwork.
- The district will make better use of data for decision making, analyzing issues, improving district operations, developing improvement plans and evaluating district efforts.
- The need for continuous improvement will be emphasized in our leadership work.
- Ongoing development and annual evaluation of district leaders is essential.
Given these organizational principles, as well as a review of the current administrative structure and administrative processes within the district, the following needs exist. In addition, in the development of this plan, input was sought from all administrators during the annual leadership retreat, individual Management Team members and individual members of the Board of Education. These needs were specifically referenced in identifying the recommended changes in our administrative structure and related administrative processes that are found in this report.In addition, as this plan was constructed there was a focus on ensuring, over the next couple of years, that the plan was sustainable from a financial point of view.
- There is a need to better align the administrative structure to the district's mission and Strategic Plan and to place greater priority on the mission-work of our organization (improved achievement for all students and the elimination of achievement gaps).
- From an administrative perspective, the mission-work of our district is mainly delivered through teaching and learning and leadership work being done in our schools. Central service functions must act in support of this work. In addition, central service functions are needed to ensure constancy of focus and direction for the district.
- New processes are needed to allow for stakeholder engagement and input and to create greater inter-department and division collaboration and cooperation
- The mission of the district must be central to decisions made in the district.
- The organizational structure must support PreK -12 articulation and coordination needs within the district.
- Leadership work must embody principles of contemporary learning organizations, effective school practices, participative and distributive leadership and teamwork. Included in this will be a focus on the purposeful use ofteacher leadership, support for our schools and a focus on positive culture within the district.
- There must be an enhanced focus on the use of data in our improvement and related accountability efforts.
- There is a need to unifonnly implement school and department improvement plans and to change administrative supervision and evaluation plans based on research in the field and on the need for continuous improvement of all schools, departments and all individual administrators.
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David Carr writes about media and culture for The New York Times, which is not why I wanted to interview him for this series. Rather, it was what Atlantic Monthly called his "joyous peculiarity" in this article.Carr tells his own story in "The Night of the Gun," a beautifully written, funny yet wrenching memoir that spares nothing about the drug addiction and madness into which he descended, but, from which, almost unbelievably, he escaped.
Before going to The Times, he was a contributing writer for Atlantic and New York Magazine and was the media writer for Inside.com. He also worked at the alternativeCity Paper in Washington D.C., as editor.
A father with three daughters, Carr and his wife now live in Montclair, N.J. Here are excerpts from our conversation about his formal and informal education.
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As a rookie mom, I used to be shocked when another parent expressed horror about a teacher I thought was a superstar. No more. The fact is that your kids' results will vary with teachers, just as they do with pills, diets and exercise regimens.The Madison School District has been using Value Added Assessment based on the oft - criticized WKCE.Nonetheless, we all want our kids to have at least a few excellent teachers along the way, so it's tempting to buy into hype about value-added measures (VAM) as a way to separate the excellent from the horrifying, or least the better from the worse.
It's so tempting that VAM is likely to be part of a reauthorized No Child Left Behind. The problem is, researchers urge caution because of the same kinds of varied results featured in playground conversations.
Value-added measures use test scores to track the growth of individual students as they progress through the grades and see how much "value" a teacher has added.
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All the teachers at Central Falls High School in Rhode Island were fired by the board of trustees this week. More such cases are likely to arise across the US in the coming year because of pressure from the Obama administration - and the incentive of billions of federal dollars.A small, high-poverty school district in Rhode Island is now ground zero for some of the most explosive debates over reforming America's worst-performing schools.
To the dismay of many local and national union members, all the teachers, the principal, and other staff of Central Falls High School were fired by the board of trustees this week. The move is part of a dramatic turnaround plan proposed by the superintendent and approved by the state education commissioner.
Because of pressure from the Obama administration - and the incentive of billions of federal dollars - more such cases are likely to arise across the United States in the coming year.
Advocates of the "turnaround" approach say it's a way to remove bad teachers or change a culture that makes it difficult for good teachers to work effectively. But teachers feel scapegoated. And there's no clear-cut research guaranteeing that student test scores will improve when schools are reorganized with new staffs.
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Seven out of 10 black charter school students are on campuses with extremely few white students, according to a new study of enrollment trends that shows the independent public schools are less racially diverse than their traditional counterparts.The findings from the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, which are being released Thursday, reflect the proliferation of charter schools in the District of Columbia and other major cities with struggling school systems and high minority populations.
To the authors of the study, the findings point to a civil rights issue: "As the country continues moving steadily toward greater segregation and inequality of education for students of color in schools with lower achievement and graduation rates," the study concludes, "the rapid growth of charter schools has been expanding a sector that is even more segregated than the public schools."
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Mr Kennedy said that next week they would announce the cuts from the Central Administration budget. He said they needed to be at $6M and are at $5.4 so far. Kay said that in Meg's report that there had been growth in Central Administration and if we grew by $7M, shouldn't we be cutting $12M? Kennedy said he would get to that later in the meeting (but I don't remember it happening). There was some discussion again about how the coaches had been inproperly coded by OSPI standards.Michael again said that the district needs to have transparency in these kinds of budget issues (coding and labeling and sorting) because of the confusion it causes. He said we can't have internal accounting that differs from external accounting.
Kay asked about comparing our Central office numbers with other districts but the answer was that it was too difficult to do because of the differences. (That didn't seem to stop the State Auditor two years ago - I'll have to send that report to Kay.)
(According to the report, both Viewlands and Rainier View Elementaries will have ELL and Special Ed programs.)
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A former bank compliance officer now enrolled in graduate school has won the inaugural essay contest on banking regulation sponsored by the International Centre for Financial Regulation and the Financial Times.Nana Esi Atsem, 31, won the $7,500 prize for the best entry with an essay that sought to answer the question: "What works best for banking regulation: market discipline or hard-wired rules?"
Her essay won praise from the judges for its discussion of the best way to give creditors a stake in preventing excessive risk-taking, including a comparison of contingent capital, a form of debt that converts to equity when a bank gets into trouble, with subordinated debt, in which some creditors would see their claims made junior to those of depositors and senior bond holders.
"Fuelling debate around regulatory reform remains a key objective for the ICFR and the Financial Times. The research prize was designed to engage financial industry participants in a discussion on the repercussions of banking regulation on the global economy and the submissions we received surpassed our expectations," said Lord Currie, ICFR chairman.
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As design issues get worked out on the Edgewater Hotel expansion project, some local school board members are raising concerns about city tax money being used on the redevelopment.Much of the focus on the Edgewater development so far has been on the design of the building. But what might affect residents more is the city financing for the project, WISC-TV reported.
"The bottom line is we need a public discussion about how these districts benefit us and how they might hurt us," said Lucy Mathiak, vice president of the Madison School Board.
Mathiak has some concerns about a $16 million loan from the city to the Edgewater developer."There are things we need to do as a (school) district and do differently with our budget, but this takes revenue away from us," said Mathiak.
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Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
26 February 2010
The Kaiser Foundation, in its January 2010 report on the use of electronic entertainment media by U.S. students, aged 8-18, found that, on average, these young people are spending more than seven hours a day (53 hours a week) with such (digital) amusements.
For some, this would call into question whether students have time to read the nonfiction books and to write the research papers they will need to work on to get themselves ready for college and careers, not to mention the homework for their other courses.
For the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, however, the problem appears to be that we are not paying enough attention to the possible present and future connections between digital media and learning, so they have decided to invest $50,000,000 in grants to explore that relationship.
One recent two-year grant, "for $650,000 to study the effect of digital media on young people's ethical development and to develop curricula for parents and teachers," went to the Harvard Education School, which has distinguished itself for, among other things, seeming to have no one on its faculty with any research or teaching interest in the actual academic work of high school students, for example in chemistry, history, economics, physics, foreign languages, calculus, and the like.
The Harvard Ed School faculty do show real interest in poverty, disability, psychological problems, race, gender, ethnicity, and the development of moral character, so they may take to this idea of studying the relation between electronic media and student ethics. A visit to the Harvard Ed School website, and a review of the research interests of the faculty would prove enlightening to anyone who thought, for some odd reason, that they might be paying attention to the academic work of students in the schools.
Whether Harvard will conclude that seven hours a day doesn't help much with the ethical development of students or not, one could certainly wish that they would discover that spending a lot of their time on digital media does very little for student preparation for college academic work that is at all demanding, not to mention the actual work of their careers, unless they are in the digital entertainment fields, of course.
The National Writing Project, which regularly has received $26,000,000 each year in federal grants for many years to help thousands of teachers feel more comfortable writing about themselves, has now received $1.1 million in grants from the MacArthur Foundation, presumably so that they may now direct some of their efforts to helping students use digital media to write about themselves as well.
Perhaps someone should point out, to MacArthur, the National Writing Project, the Harvard Ed School, and anyone else involved in this egregious folly and waste of money, that our students already spend a great deal of their time each and every day writing and talking about themselves with their friends, using a variety of electronic media.
In fact, it is generally the case that the students (without any grants) are already instructing any of their teachers who are interested in the use of a variety of electronic media.
But like folks in any other self-sustaining educational enterprise, those conversing on the uses of digital media in learning about digital media need a chance to talk about what they are doing, whether it is harmful to serious academic progress for our students or not, so MacArthur has also granted to "the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (in Monterey, California) $2,140,000 to build the field of Digital Media and Learning through a new journal, conferences, and convenings (over five years)."
The MacArthur Foundation website has a list of scores more large grants for these projects in digital media studies and digital learning (it is not clear, of course, what "digital learning" actually means, if anything).
This very expensive and time-consuming distraction from any effort to advance respectable common standards for the actual academic work of students in our nation's schools must be enjoyable, both for those giving out the $50 million, and, I suppose, for those receiving it, but the chances are good that their efforts will only help to make the college and career readiness of our high school students an even more distant goal.
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog
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Mike Ivey, via a kind reader's email:
The doors at the Society of St. Vincent de Paul food pantry on Fish Hatchery Road don't open for another 30 minutes, but a line has already formed.They wait quietly, for the most part, this rainbow coalition of all ages: African-American grandmothers, Latino families, young women with pierced tongues, disabled seniors and working fathers.
What they have in common is poverty. Once a month, with a valid photo ID, clients get enough groceries to last a week.
"As my kids get older, I just keep having to cook more, so every bit helps," says Belinda Washington, 44, who has four children at home ages 4 to 17.
A Chicago native, Washington moved to Madison 17 years ago and lives in the Lake Point neighborhood off West Broadway on the city's south side. Her resume includes food service, catering and factory work but she's been unemployed since her youngest was born. "I keep applying but the jobs are hard to come by," she says.
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ne of the most firmly entrenched academic practices centers upon the use of textbooks as the fundamental drivers of curricula. Ultra-expensive, these items represent one of the largest costs for public school systems as well as those attending college.As the digital age continues to work its way into the stuffy world of academics, there are clear indications that textbooks are gradually being phased out in many areas of the country. The sheer volume of resources available on the net is leading many school districts to create and share their own materials.
Macmillan, considered one of the largest players in that old, conservative world, apparently has now also seen the "handwriting on the wall." The company recently announced it will offer academics an entirely new format: DynamicBooks.
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The mass firing of teachers at a Rhode Island high school this week is hardly new: For nearly two decades, states and school districts have been "reconstituting" staffs at struggling public schools.But Tuesday's move by Central Falls, R.I., Superintendent Frances Gallo to remove all 74 teachers, administrators and counselors at the district's only high school may be the first tangible result of an aggressive push by the Obama administration to get tough on school accountability -- and may signal a more fraught relationship between teachers unions and Democratic leaders.
"This may be one school in one town, but it represents a much bigger phenomenon," says Andy Smarick of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington, D.C., education think tank. "Thanks to years of work battling the achievement gap and the elevation of reform-minded education leaders, we may finally be getting serious about the nation's lowest-performing schools."
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In some quarters I'm viewed as a lawyer with a professional identity problem: I've spent half of my time representing students and professors struggling with administrators over issues like free speech, academic freedom, due process and fair disciplinary procedures. The other half I've spent representing individuals (and on occasion organizations and companies) in the criminal justice system.These two seemingly disparate halves of my professional life are, in fact, quite closely related: The respective cultures of the college campus and of the federal government have each thrived on the notion that language is meant not to express one's true thoughts, intentions and expectations, but, instead, to cover them up. As a result, the tyrannies that I began to encounter in the mid-1980s in both academia and the federal criminal courts shared this major characteristic: It was impossible to know when one was transgressing the rules, because the rules were suddenly being expressed in language that no one could understand.
In his 1946 linguistic critique, Politics and the English Language, George Orwell wrote that one must "let meaning choose the word, not the other way around." By largely ignoring this truism, administrators and legislators who craft imprecise regulations have given their particular enforcement arms---campus disciplinary staff and federal government prosecutors---enormous and grotesquely unfair power.
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You would think that raising standards and pushing for an extending day and year would be a great time to embrace a couple thousand entrepreneurial organizations that specialize in targeted tutoring and compelling after-school learning. You would think that a disruptive effort to fix or replace the lowest performing schools would be accompanied by an insurance policy of direct support for low income students that have been trapped in low performing schools. You would think that 500,000 low income minority students receiving targeted tutoring sounded like a good idea. However, Supplemental Educational Service (SES) providers are getting the message that they are not needed; more specifically, they are getting the message that school districts want the $3b Title 1 set aside back.Maybe we just got off on the wrong foot; SES was inserted as what seemed like punishment in a progression of interventions in NCLB and, a result, most districts didn't do much to market these extended learning opportunities. Where districts embraced SES providers as partners in student success, tailored solutions worked well for schools, kids, and parents.
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The Bloomberg administration has made getting rid of inadequate teachers a linchpin of its efforts to improve city schools. But in the two years since the Education Department began an intensive effort to root out such teachers from the more than 55,000 who have tenure, officials have managed to fire only three for incompetence.Ten others whom the department charged with incompetence settled their cases by resigning or retiring, and nine agreed to pay fines of a few thousand dollars or take classes, or both, so they could keep their jobs. One teacher lost his job before his case was decided, after the department called immigration officials and his visa was revoked. The cases of more than 50 others are awaiting arbitration.
Lawyers for the department said an additional 418 teachers had left the system after finding out that they could face charges of incompetence. Because no formal charges were brought in these cases, the number is hard to corroborate; officials from the teachers' union said they doubted it was that high.
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In education, there's a lot up in the air right now: standards, testing, employment practices, budgets, student technology, online learning, and federal policy. It's conceivable that if we took advantage of the uncertainty, a few places could emerge with a better and cheaper education system. Here's three pivot points that could anchor next generation systems:1. Merit Badges: the goal of college and career readiness and development Common Core standards will require most states, district to make lots of course and curriculum. States could use the opportunity to replace the 100 year old seat time and credit system with a new merit badge system--a bundle of assessments would be used to demonstrate learning of a bundle of competencies. Take ratios and fractions as an example; a merit badge would describe what students need to know and a combination of ways they can show it including content-embedded assessment (e.g., game score), performance assessment (e.g., project), adaptive assessment (e.g., online quiz), and an end of unit test. Mastery-based learning and merit badge evidence would replace grades and courses as the primary mechanism to mark student progress.
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Education Secretary Arne Duncan faced unusually sharp questioning from House Democrats Thursday over the Obama administration's proposals to eliminate a grant for the Teach for America program and hold the line on new funding for many other education programs.The House Budget Committee hearing on the $50.7 billion education budget proposed for the fiscal year that begins in October provided an early glimpse at congressional reaction to the Obama administration's plan to put more emphasis on competitions for federal funding, including its signature Race to the Top initiative that will reward states and school districts whose education policies are in line with Obama's.
For decades, education programs have been driven by formulas that spread money across the country based on population, poverty levels and other factors, as well as targeted grants to benefit specific organizations. Those formulas mean that all 535 members of Congress can point to federal funding flowing to schools in their states and districts.
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Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee has fired 10 D.C. teachers for administering corporal punishment and two for sexual misconduct since July 2007, according to a report she submitted to D.C. Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray.Another 28 teachers served suspensions of as long as 10 days for administering corporal punishment, defined by District law as the use or attempted use of force against a student as punishment or discipline.
The report, sent to Gray (D) on Feb. 12, does not include names and offers only fragmentary descriptions of the incidents. Most involve grabbing, shoving, slapping, scratching or arm-twisting. One teacher drew a five-day suspension for putting a student in a closet and turning the lights off in February 2008. A case of spanking in November 2007 resulted in a teacher's dismissal and reinstatement after a hearing officer's decision. An instructor who threatened students with a knife if they misbehaved received a one-day suspension.
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n January 2010, a 9-year old boy named Montana Lance hung himself in a bathroom at the Texas elementary school he attended. Although certainly shocking, such acts are unfortunately becoming less and less unusual. In fact, the suicide of Montana Lance is very reminiscent of what happened in April 2009 when two 11-year-old boys, one in Massachusetts and one in Georgia, likewise committed suicide just days apart. What would cause these children to end their lives? The answer in each case is the same: all three suffered extreme levels of victimization at the hands of school bullies--bullying that others have described as involving "relentless homophobic taunts." And, as we can see from the fate of these three little boys, this form of harassment was obviously very traumatic.In this article, I look at the growing problem of school bullying in America today. Now, almost all children are teased and most will even face at least some form of bullying during their childhood. However, studies reveal that some children will unfortunately become chronic victims of school bullying. Chief among that group are those children whose gender expression is at odds with what society considers "appropriate." As my article explores, the gender stereotypes that exist within our society are frequently to blame for the more extreme levels of bullying currently being carried out in our nation's schools. And the impact this bullying has on its victims is staggering. Earlier I mentioned three children who took their own lives as a result of bullying. These are but three examples of those who have lost their lives to gender-based bullying. However, there are countless other victims who, although not paying with their lives, are nonetheless paying dearly in other ways. Specifically, the psychological literature on the emotional impacts that befall these chronic victims of bullying reveals a whole host of resulting problems--debilitating consequences that can last a lifetime.
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Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:
A reading day with student performances and food.A clothing swap for families that doubles as a PTO meeting.
Free transportation, child care and translators so more parents can participate in after-school functions.
Madison schools are doing a lot to draw more parents - especially minority and low-income parents - into their children's educations. And much of the credit goes to creative parent leaders and teachers.
The stepped-up effort is encouraging and should continue in Madison and across Wisconsin.
The more parents of all backgrounds spend time at their children's schools, the more likely their children will engage and succeed.
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March 5, 6, 12, 13
7:30 p.m.
West High School Auditorium
L. Joe Dahl, Director; Kelle Adams, Choreographer; Rebecca Jallings, Producer; Holly Walker, Assistant Producer; Serina Jolivette, Music Director; Steve Morgan, Orchestra Director; Brynna Godar, Stage Manager.
Tickets ($10 for adults, $8 for students) may be purchased in advance (highly recommended) at www.seatyourself.biz/mwhs . Some tickets may also be available at the door.
Synopsis: All the hot gamblers are in town, and they're all depending on Nathan Detroit to set up this week's incarnation of "The Oldest Established Permanent Floating Crap Game in New York." The only problem is that he needs $1,000 to get the place. Throw in Sarah Brown, who's short on sinners at the mission she runs; Sky Masterson, who accepts Nathan's $1,000 bet that he can't get Sarah Brown to go with him to Havana, Cuba; Miss Adelaide, who wants Nathan to marry her; Police Lieutenant Brannigan, who always seems to appear at the wrong time; and the masterful music and lyrics of Frank Loesser, and you've got quite a musical. Includes the songs "Fugue for Tinhorns," "Luck Be a Lady," and "Sit Down, You're Rocking the Boat."
Don't miss it!
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Channel3000: The Beloit School District is facing a $1.5 million budget shortfall, but teachers are offering their help by taking days off.
The Beloit Education Association, which is the teacher's union in the district, previously agreed to open its contract if state aid decreased from one year to the next.
"We went back to the table and worked out a voluntary settlement with the district regarding furlough days and salary reductions for those furlough days," said Tim Verda, president of the Beloit Education Association.
The teacher's union is going beyond a pay freeze by offering to take one furlough day this year and two next year.
The school district said it will result in a savings of $658,000.
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For entertainment value read the Discovering Math Q&A in this article in the Seattle Times. The Discovering Math guy (1) doesn't always answer the question asked, (2) answers but doesn't address the topic properly - see the question on if Discovering Math is "mathematically unsound" and (3) sounds like he works for the district.Much more on the successful community lawsuit vs. the Seattle School District's implementation of Discovery Math. Math Forum audio / video.Here's one example:
The Discovering books have been criticized by parents, but they've been the top pick of a couple of districts in our area, including Seattle and Issaquah. Any thoughts on why the textbooks seem to be more popular with educators than with parents?
Ryan: I think because (parents) lack familiarity -- this doesn't look like what I was taught. I don't know how you get students to a place where more is required of them by repeating things that have been done in the past. That's not how we move forward in life.
What?
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The NYTimes ran a story with this misleading headline and byline:Related: Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman's speech to the Madison Rotary:A Vote to Fire All Teachers at a Failing High SchoolWhen the teachers failed to adopt a 'transformation' plan that included a modest lengthening of the day, the superintendent shifted to Plan B, what federal School Improvement Grants (SIG) call Turnaround, which requires that at least 50% of the staff be replaced. Under Rhode Island law, teachers must be notified of the potential for nonrenewal by March 20, hence the board vote and notices. All the teachers will have the opportunity to reapply, up to half will be rehired.CENTRAL FALLS, R.I. -- A plan to dismiss the entire faculty and staff of the only public high school in this small city just west of the Massachusetts border was approved Tuesday night at an emotional public meeting of the school board.
The hysteria is now reverberating on CNN and papers around the country. Central Falls may be an early example but there are thousands to come. As I began reporting in October, SIG will cause widespread urban disruption. But we'll all need to be cautious to use language carefully and differentiate between 'firing all the teachers' and notifying them of the requirement to reapply for their positions.
Last Wednesday, Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman spoke to the Madison Rotary Club on "What Wisconsin's Public Education Model Needs to Learn from General Motors Before it is too late." 7MB mp3 audio (the audio quality is not great, but you can hear the talk if you turn up the volume!).Zimman's talk ranged far and wide. He discussed Wisconsin's K-12 funding formula (it is important to remember that school spending increases annually (from 1987 to 2005, spending grew by 5.10% annually in Wisconsin and 5.25% in the Madison School District), though perhaps not in areas some would prefer.
"Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk - the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It's as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands." Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI's vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the "impossibility" of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars ("Similar to GM"; "worry" about the children given this situation).
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Elmore Leonard, Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Helen Dunmore, Geoff Dyer, Anne Enright, Richard Ford, Jonathan Franzen, Esther Freud, Neil Gaiman, David Hare, PD James, AL Kennedy:
Get an accountant, abstain from sex and similes, cut, rewrite, then cut and rewrite again - if all else fails, pray. Inspired by Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing, we asked authors for their personal dos and don'tsElmore Leonard: Using adverbs is a mortal sin
1 Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a charac ter's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead look ing for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.
2 Avoid prologues: they can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday, but it's OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: "I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks."
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Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:
Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce is often maligned for throwing its weight around at the state Capitol.But it was the big state teachers union (WEAC) that spent - by far - more money on lobbying last year than any other special interest group.
It helps explain why the teachers got precisely what they wanted from the Democratic-run Legislature and governor's office in the last state budget: repeal of state limits on teacher compensation.
It also shows why reforming public education - to require more accountability and innovation - won't be easy. The teachers union has resisted pay for performance, something commonplace in most professions, and frowned on innovative charter schools. State leaders will need to stand up to the union if public education is to be transformed.
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Best way to guarantee a financially stress-free retirement in Wisconsin?Work for the government.
State public employees - such as public school teachers and state and city workers - on average receive hundreds of dollars more per month in retirement than higher-paid employees in the private sector, according to a new report from the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute.
Even as the state has lost 140,000 jobs and one-eighth of its manufacturing workforce during the recession, public employees' benefits have been protected. Those statistics prompted the institute to commission the report, said George Lightbourn, the president of the conservative think tank.
According to the report, an employee covered by the Wisconsin Retirement System who earns $48,000 a year would retire with an estimated monthly benefit of $1,712 from the system.
In contrast, a private sector employee who earned $70,000 a year would get an estimated $1,301 a month in retirement - or $411 less per month than the lower-paid public sector retiree, said Joan Gucciardi, a Milwaukee-area actuary with more than 40 years of experience who spent nine months preparing the report.
Gucciardi said she was surprised to learn that most public school teachers and others covered by the state retirement system don't pay what's called the employee contribution - about half of the 11.2% or more of their salary that's deposited into their pension fund accounts each year. While state law makes that share negotiable, nearly all public employees in Wisconsin get it paid for them.
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Spring, 2010 PDF, via email:
I would like to discuss a book which helps to inform educators and parents about gifted education in other countries from developmental, family and international perspectives. It is an excellent example of the increasing worldwide interest in studying and educating the most advanced students. By using the case study research method, Hanna David, Ph.D. and Echo Wu, Ph.D. have written fascinating accounts of Israeli and Chinese students who have demonstrated giftedness in public school classrooms and at the university level. David is a professor of education at Ben Gurion University in Eliat, Israel and Echo Wu is now teaching at the Hong Kong Institute of Education. Their book, Understanding Giftedness: A Chinese-Israeli Casebook (Pearson, 2010, ISBN 981-06-8300-6), contains such research topics as a study of five gifted boys in one classroom, parental influences of three Chinese-American families on talent development, case study of a visually disabled young boy (seven years), conversation with a Chinese Nobel Laureate (chemistry), and case study of a gifted family emigrating from Russia to Israel. All of these studies are a clear demonstration of the forcefulness of gifted characteristics and behavior under sometimes severe pressures from cultural influences and learning disabilities. The book also serves as an inspiration to researchers who use the case study method for studying giftedness. In this sense, David and Wu follow the traditions of Piaget and other masters of child development who grounded their work in making systematic observations and carefully recording the individual child's intellectual development. I highly recommend that Understanding Giftedness be used as a model for further studies of the gifted mind.
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He tells the National Governors Assn. that states will be required to help students be 'college- and career-ready.'Reporting from Washington - Decrying shortcomings of the No Child Left Behind Act, President Obama on Monday pledged to make American students more competitive in the global economy by encouraging higher state standards for primary and secondary education.
Students in the United States lag by several crucial measures, Obama told a gathering of the nation's governors at the White House, with eighth-graders ranking ninth in the world in math and 11th in science.
"In response to assessments like these, some states have upped their game," Obama said, pointing to Massachusetts, where eighth-graders are tied for first in science around the world. "Some states have actually done the opposite, and between 2005 and 2007, under No Child Left Behind, 11 states actually lowered their standards in math."
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The current school funding crisis has a lot of people talking about raising taxes, creating new taxes or closing so-called tax loopholes, to provide more revenue for Michigan's K-12 school districts.We at Education Action Group Foundation don't pretend to be experts on school funding, particularly on a statewide level. But we do know that local school districts are forced to spend a great deal of money on unnecessary labor costs, at a time when they can least afford it.
We don't believe the state has the moral right to ask taxpayers for another dime for education until it helps local school districts free themselves from crippling labor expenses.
To support our argument, we spent a few weeks examining 25 teacher contracts from districts throughout Michigan, carefully choosing schools of various size and geographic location. We found countless examples of contractual expenses that are questionable in the current economic environment.
Our study is by no means scientific. It simply offers a sampling of the type of expenses that schools are forced to deal with by the state's teachers unions. We believe Michigan residents will be surprised to learn how some of their tax dollars are spent.
Our source was the public school contract database, posted online and updated regularly by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. The database can be accessed by logging on to http://www.mackinac.org/10361.
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n the pantheon of unpopular moves by school superintendents, perhaps none rivals what John Covington wants to do.Much more on Kansas City's school closing plans here.
Faced with declining enrollment and a $50 million budget shortfall, the Kansas City, Mo., schools chief wants the school board to close as many as 31 of the city's 61 schools and lay off one-fourth of its employees -- including 285 teachers.Covington wants it done by the time school starts in fall. A vote could come in March.
"The bottom line is the quality of education we're offering children in Kansas City is not good enough," he says. "One reason it's not good enough is that we've tried to spread our resources over far too many schools."
Closing schools in shrinking urban districts is nothing new: It's happening in dozens of cities, including Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Memphis, San Antonio and Washington, D.C. But the scope of Covington's plan sets it apart from even the most cash-strapped school districts.
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Two computer security experts, Aaron Rhodes and a man known by his pseudonym Stryde Hax, put together an eye-opening and well-researched attack on both the Lower Merion High School that's been accused of spying on students and the software that was used to do it. In the process, they reveal some disturbing school policies regarding the use of the laptops, and the unnerving nature of the software itself.More here.The writers scoured forum activity, blog posts, and publicity videos made by one Mike Perbix, the Harriton High School technical security staffer who was in charge of the use of LANRev, the software in question. They also hunted down comments from some of the more tech-savvy members of the student body, who revealed some pretty startling policies regarding the laptops.
The main points: the school-supplied (and monitored) MacBooks were required for certain classes; the included Webcams could not be disabled; the laptops could not be "jailbroken" to circumvent the security measures (and any attempt could result in expulsion); and possession of a personal computer, meaning one other than the school-supplied MacBook, was forbidden and subject to confiscation. One example, from a student:
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Illinois government is staring down the barrel of an explosive financial mess, and perhaps nothing frames the danger better than two big numbers.The first is $26 billion, the grand total that lawmakers have allotted this year for the meat of what the state does: funding education, health care, child welfare, public safety and the machinery of government itself.
The second number is $13 billion, the total of red ink in the state's main checking account that, by law, has to be erased -- at least on paper -- before a penny can be set aside for day-to-day operations in the fiscal year, which begins July 1.
In short, the deficit is half as big as the core of the state budget.
To experts, that is an astoundingly scary ratio that ranks Illinois as one of the nation's worst fiscal basket cases -- if not the worst. The budget deficit in Illinois is almost as big as the one facing California, a financially beleaguered state that has triple Illinois' population, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal Washington-based think tank.
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The shootings on February 12 at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, which left three faculty members dead and two more professors and a department assistant wounded, have sparked a good deal of soul-searching within higher education. Amy Bishop, an assistant professor of biology at the university who was recently denied tenure, was arrested at the scene and has been charged with murder and attempted murder.Bishop's tenure denial may or may not be relevant to the shootings, but some scholars are asking what role, if any, the stresses of academic life played in the tragedy. What are the psychological effects of academic culture, particularly on rising scholars? Can or should something be done to change that culture?
The Chronicle asked a group of scholars and experts what they thought.
Cristina Nehring, writer and Ph.D. candidate in English literature at the University of California at Los Angeles:
Amy Bishop is nobody's poster girl--not even for the tragic perversity of the tenure process.
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CNN:
Folklore says that George Washington was known for never telling a lie. But as the United States marks its first president's birthday, a new poll indicates that 74 percent of the public thinks the father of our country did lie to the public while he served as president - an indication that Americans think that the government has been broken for a very, very long time.The CNN/Opinion Corporation survey was released Monday, the 278th anniversary of Washington's birth.
Three quarters of people questioned in the survey think that modern-day federal officials are not honest, a figure that is essentially unchanged since 1994. But the poll suggests that Americans think the problem of dishonesty is not a new one.
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When Utah state Sen. Chris Buttars unveiled a cost-cutting measure this month that would have made the high school senior year optional, perhaps no one in the state Capitol Building was more surprised than 18-year-old Jake Trimble, who already opted out of the second half of senior year just weeks earlier.He has spent the past month working at the Capitol as an unpaid intern for the state Democratic Party's communications team, designing posters and writing scripts for legislators' robocalls. Trimble graduated in January, one semester early, from the nearby Academy of Math Engineering and Science (AMES).
"I'm very happy to not be in high school anymore," says Trimble, who proudly reports that he's "not rotting in my parents' basement." Actually, when the legislative session ends next month, he'll move on to another internship (this one paid) as a lab assistant at the University of Utah's Orthopedic Center.
Trimble is part of a small but growing group of students -- most of them academically advanced and, as a result, a tad restless -- who are tinkering with their senior year. A few observers say the quiet experiment has the potential to reinvent high school altogether.
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Walking toward the audience wearing a dark blue suit and tie, James Howard explained that he doesn't have all the answers to big issues facing Madison's schools."I won't stand here and tell you I know the best way. But we do have to make sure we protect learning," said Howard, 56, a contender for Madison school board, at a candidate forum on Sunday. "$30 million is a heck of a deficit. Have you written you r congress people? We really need to come up with a different funding source."
Tom Farley and James Howard are vying for school board Seat 4, being vacated by Johnny Winston. It is the only contested seat of three on the April 6 ballot.
Following a brief presentation from uncontested candidates Maya Cole and Beth Moss, Howard and Farley answered questions posed by forum organizers from Progressive Dane and submitted questions from an audience of about 50 at Wright Middle School. One key area of inquiry was how the candidates would go about solving an anticipated $30 million budget hole next year.
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Walking toward the audience wearing a dark blue suit and tie, James Howard explained that he doesn't have all the answers to big issues facing Madison's schools."I won't stand here and tell you I know the best way. But we do have to make sure we protect learning," said Howard, 56, a contender for Madison school board, at a candidate forum on Sunday. "$30 million is a heck of a deficit. Have you written you r congress people? We really need to come up with a different funding source."
Tom Farley and James Howard are vying for school board Seat 4, being vacated by Johnny Winston. It is the only contested seat of three on the April 6 ballot.
Following a brief presentation from uncontested candidates Maya Cole and Beth Moss, Howard and Farley answered questions posed by forum organizers from Progressive Dane and submitted questions from an audience of about 50 at Wright Middle School. One key area of inquiry was how the candidates would go about solving an anticipated $30 million budget hole next year.
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It was a pleasure to meet and visit with Fitchburg's Eagle School Co-Founder Mary Olsky recently.
We discussed a wide variety of topics, including Eagle's History (founded in 1982), curricular rigor, the importance of good textbooks and critical student thinking. I also found it interesting to hear Mary's perspective on public / private schools and her hope, in 1982, that that the Madison School District would take over (and apply its lessons) Eagle School. Of course, it did not turn out that way.
I've always found it rather amazing that Promega Founder Bill Linton's generous land offer to the Madison School District for the "Madison Middle School 2000" charter school was rejected - and the land ended up under Eagle's new facility.
Listen to the conversation via this 14mb mp3 audio file.
Read the transcript here.
Finally, Mary mentioned the term "high school" a number of times, along with $20,000,000. I suspect we'll see a high school at some point. It will take a significant effort.
Thanks to Laurie Frost for arranging this interview.
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Jay Matthews:
It wasn't until I was in my fifties that I realized how restricted my high school reading lists had been, and how little they had changed for my three children. They were enthusiastic readers, as my wife and I were. But all, or almost all, of the required books for either generation were fiction.I am not dismissing the delights of Twain, Crane, Buck, Saroyan and Wilder, all of which I read in high school. But I think I would also have enjoyed Theodore H. White, John Hersey, Barbara Tuchman and Bruce Catton if they had been assigned.
Maybe that's changing. Maybe rebellious teens these days are fleeing Faulkner, Hemingway, Austen, and Baldwin, or whoever is on the 12th grade English list, and furtively reading Malcolm Gladwell, David McCullough, Doris Kearns Goodwin and other non-fiction stars.
Sadly, no.
The Renaissance Learning company released a list of what 4.6 million students read in the 2008-2009 school year, based on its Accelerated Reader program that encourages children to choose their own books. J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter has given way to the hormonal allure of Stephenie Meyer's teen vampire books, but both school and non-school books are still almost all fiction.
When I ask local school districts why this is, some get defensive and insist they do require non-fiction. But the only title that comes up with any frequency is Night, Elie Wiesel's story of his boyhood in the Holocaust. It is one of only two nonfiction works to appear in the top 20 of Accelerated Reader's list of books read by high schoolers. The other is 'A Child Called 'It,' Dave Pelzer's account of his alleged abuse as a child by his alcoholic mother.
Will Fitzhugh, whose Concord Review quarterly publishes research papers by high school students, has been fighting for more non-fiction for years. I agree with him that high school English departments' allegiance to novels leads impressionable students to think, incorrectly, that non-fiction is a bore. That in turn makes them prefer fiction writing assignments to anything that could be described by that dreaded word "research."
A relatively new trend in student writing is called "creative nonfiction." It makes Fitzhugh shudder. "It allows high school students (mostly girls) to complete writing assignments and participate in 'essay contests' by writing about their hopes, experiences, doubts, relationships, worries, victimization (if any), and parents, as well as more existential questions such as 'How do I look?' and 'What should I wear to school?'" he said in a 2008 essay for EducationNews.org.
Educators say non-fiction is more difficult than fiction for students to comprehend. It requires more factual knowledge, beyond fiction's simple truths of love, hate, passion and remorse. So we have a pathetic cycle. Students don't know enough about the real world because they don't read non-fiction and they can't read non-fiction because they don't know enough about the real world.
Educational theorist E.D. Hirsch Jr. insists this is what keeps many students from acquiring the communication skills they need for successful lives. "Language mastery is not some abstract skill," he said in his latest book, The Making of Americans. "It depends on possessing broad general knowledge shared by other competent people within the language community."
I think we can help. Post comments here, or send an email to mathewsj@washpost.com, with non-fiction titles that would appeal to teens. I will discuss your choices in a future column. I can see why students hate writing research papers when their history and science reading has been confined to the flaccid prose of their textbooks. But what if they first read Longitude by Dava Sobel or A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar? What magical exploration of reality would you add to your favorite teenager's reading list?
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Los Angeles' Board of Education voted Tuesday to hand over some of its public schools to charter school operators and teachers groups, part of an unusual experiment.The city's Board of Education voted Tuesday to hand over some of its public schools to charter school operators and teachers groups, part of an unusual experiment to see whether outsiders will have better luck improving student achievement in the nation's second-largest school district.
But most of the 30 campuses, some with more than one school, were awarded to teachers and administrators employed by the school district. The board awarded four schools to charter groups, and two schools to a group led by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. The majority of the schools were awarded to teachers' groups. The board's vote was a blow to charter advocates and a boost to teachers in the city's divided education community.
Hundreds of parents, teachers and charter school advocates had gathered outside school board offices all day, and packed the board room during the five-hour meeting.
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Bruce Vinik via Valerie Strauss:
It's that time of year again. Pitchers and catchers are reporting to spring training and high school students are puzzling over which classes to take next fall. The choices students make do matter. Outside of grades, nothing is more important in college admissions than the classes kids take in high school. "Strength of Program" is a big deal.Let's start with the basics. Colleges expect students to take at least five core academic subjects every year of high school -- English, social studies, science, math and foreign language.
In a perfect world, students would take each core subject every year. But the world isn't perfect and colleges don't expect kids to be. As long as students take each core subject through eleventh grade, they should feel free to pursue their particular academic interests in greater depth during twelfth grade. There's nothing wrong with dropping social studies senior year in order to double up on science.
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n a conversation last week with a big muckety-muck, I realized that there are two fundamentally different, and largely opposed, understandings of outcomes assessment in play. Which definition you accept will color your expectations.
The first is what I used to consider the basic definition: internal measures of outcomes, used to generate improvement over time. If you understand assessment in this way, then several things follow. You might not want all of it to be public, since the candid warts-and-all conversations that underlie real improvement simply wouldn't happen on the public record. You'd pay special attention to shortcomings, since that's where improvement is most needed. You'd want some depth of understanding, often favoring thicker explanations over thinner ones, since an overly reductive measure would defeat the purpose.The second understanding is of assessment as a form of marketing. See how great we are! You should come here! The "you" in that last sentence could be prospective students being lured to a particular college, or it could be companies being lured to a particular state. If you understand assessment in this way, then several things follow. You'd want it to be as public as possible, since advertising works best when people see it. You'd pay special attention to strengths, rather than shortcomings. You'd downplay 'improvement,' since it implies an existing lack. And you'd want simplicity. When in doubt, go with the thinner explanation rather than the thicker one; you can't do a thick description in a thirty-second elevator pitch.
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A math class for students with intellectual disabilities at Paul VI Catholic High School in Fairfax practiced naming dates on a calendar one recent morning and deciphering what time it is when the big hand is on the 10 and the little hand is on the 11. But first, the teacher led them in a prayer.Father in heaven, we offer you this class and all that we may accomplish today," they said together.
Federal law requires that public schools offer a free, appropriate education for students with disabilities, and federal and state governments subsidize the higher costs of smaller classes and extra resources. Catholic schools have no such legal mandate, and financial constraints have historically made it difficult for them to offer similar specialized services.
That is starting to change.
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There are videos showing off card tricks, horsemanship, jump rope and stencils -- and lots of rap songs, including one by a young woman who performed two weeks after oral surgery, with her mouth still rubber-banded shut.There is also Rhaina Cohen's video, working off the saying "You never truly know someone until you have walked a mile in her shoes," and featuring the blue sandals from her bat mitzvah, the white sneakers she bought cheaply in Britain, and the black heels in which she "stood next to Hillary Clinton."
It is reading season at the Tufts University admissions office, time to plow through thousands of essays and transcripts and recommendations -- and this year, for the first time, short YouTube videos that students could post to supplement their application.
About 1,000 of the 15,000 applicants submitted videos. Some have gotten thousands of hits on YouTube.
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Readers can modify content on the Web, so why not in books?In a kind of Wikipedia of textbooks, Macmillan, one of the five largest publishers of trade books and textbooks, is introducing software called DynamicBooks, which will allow college instructors to edit digital editions of textbooks and customize them for their individual classes.
Professors will be able to reorganize or delete chapters; upload course syllabuses, notes, videos, pictures and graphs; and perhaps most notably, rewrite or delete individual paragraphs, equations or illustrations.
While many publishers have offered customized print textbooks for years -- allowing instructors to reorder chapters or insert third-party content from other publications or their own writing -- DynamicBooks gives instructors the power to alter individual sentences and paragraphs without consulting the original authors or publisher.
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Paul Hill via a Center on Reinventing Public Education email:
Why haven't schools of choice yet achieved a broader appeal? Publicly funded school choice programs--charter schools in forty-three states and vouchers in a few localities--have for the most part been qualified successes. Yet the rhetoric of choice supporters promised much more effective schools and an era of innovation that has not come to pass. In Learning as We Go: Why School Choice Is Worth the Wait, Paul T. Hill examines the real-world factors that can complicate, delay, and in some instances interfere with the positive cause-and-effect relationships identified by the theories behind school choice.Hill explains why schools of choice haven't yet achieved a broader appeal and details the key factors--including politics, policy, and regulation--that explain the delay. The author then suggests changes in public policy along with philanthropic investment that could overcome barriers and increase the rate of progress toward full operation of what he calls the "virtuous cycle" stimulated by school choice.
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Jefferson Middle School parents and staff members who put away their band instruments years ago -- or maybe never played one -- will get a chance to perform in a school band concert.A portion of Jefferson's band concert at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday in the gymnasium will feature five songs performed by about 30 parents and community members connected to the school. They'll be joined by about 10 staff members.
This is the second time in five years that Jefferson band director Allison Jaeger has invited adults to join the middle schoolers -- an idea her husband, Ben Jaeger, had tried earlier at Spring Harbor Middle School, where he is the band director. Jaeger had fun taking part in that concert.
"Really the most important thing is that the parents are showing they are learning right alongside their students," Jaeger said.
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Marching orders bellowed from across the state Senate president's balcony on Monday, jolting the union members nestled in the public gallery.They had to get out -- now. Too noisy. Too crowded. The beefy sergeant-at-arms did not seem to care that some people had secured those seats hours earlier.
"That's everybody," he said, his arms shooing them toward the exits.
"Well, that's a first," a stunned New Jersey Education Association representative complained.
A brigade of public employee union leaders, hoping to defeat four pension "reform" bills with a last-minute show of force, also found little sympathy or patience downstairs at the door to the Senate chambers. A "Vote No!" chant was quickly doused. Officials herded them along the wall. An irritated state trooper snapped at one protester perceived to be a little too loud.
Public employee unions, whose money and muscle once earned them a permanent access to Trenton's inner sanctums of power, are being told to leave their business cards at the door. They once roamed the State House halls, feared and respected; now they are subjected to aggressive crowd control.
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Woodrow Wilson International Center:
Arundhati Jayarao, Middle and High School Chemistry and Physics, Virginia; Sarah Yue, High School Chemistry, California; Kirk Janowiak, High School Biology and Environmental Science, Indiana; Ben Van Dusen, High School Physics, Oregon; Mark Greenman, High School Physics, Massachusetts; and John Moore, High School Environmental Science, New Jersey.
Moderated By: Kent Hughes, Director, Program on America and the Global Economy.The Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellows offer a unique perspective on U.S. schools and educational policymaking; they have been chosen by the Department of Energy to spend a fellowship year in congressional or executive offices based on their excellence in teaching science, technology, engineering, and mathematics(STEM) subjects in K-12 schools. The Fellows will discuss how to achieve national standards that are benchmarked to the world's best and how higher standards will affect changes in curricula.
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Deborah Kenny talks a lot about passion -- the passion for teaching, for reading and for learning. She has it. She wants all of her teachers to have it. Above all, she wants her students to have it.Ms. Kenny has created three phenomenally successful charter schools in Harlem and is in the process of creating more. She's gotten a great deal of national attention. But for all the talk about improving schools in this country, she thinks we tend to miss the point more often than not.
There is an overemphasis on "the program elements," she said, "things like curriculum and class size and school size and the longer day." She understood in 2001, when she was planning the first of the schools that have come to be known as the Harlem Village Academies, that none of those program elements were nearly as important as the quality of the teaching in the schools.
"If you had an amazing teacher who was talented and passionate and given the freedom and support to teach well," she said, "that was just 100 times more important than anything else."
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The next time Lower Merion school administrators want to talk to students and parents about their laptop-camera controversy, they will have to get a lawyer's blessing.Not from their own lawyers, but the ones suing them on behalf of a Harriton High sophomore who claims the school invaded his home and his privacy by remotely snapping his image with the camera on his school-provided laptop.
The unusual order, signed by a federal judge yesterday, means those running the elite Lower Merion School District can't say a word about the laptop cameras or any other issues in the suit without giving the other side a copy of what they want to say - plus six hours' notice.
Such communication limits are commonplace in class-action litigation, but rare in the context of a school district at the center of what's become a nationwide controversy.
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Teacher seniority rules are meeting resistance from government officials and parents as a wave of layoffs is hitting public schools and driving newer teachers out of classrooms.In a majority of the country's school districts, teacher layoffs are handled on a "last in, first out" basis. Critics of seniority rules worry that many effective and talented teachers who have been hired in recent years will lose their jobs.
Unions say that seniority rules are the only objective way to carry out layoffs, and that they protect teachers from the whims and bias of managers, who might fire effective teachers they don't like.
This year, because of cuts in state aid to New York City, the city could be facing a loss of about 8,500 teacher jobs out of a total of 80,000. The last time the nation's largest school system laid off a teacher was 1976.
If New York City is forced to lay off some of the more than 30,000 new teachers it has hired in the past five years, it is "going to be catastrophic," said Joel Klein, chancellor of the city's school system. "We're going to be losing a lot of great new teachers that we hired" in recent years, the chancellor said.
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33-year-old math and science whiz kid -- working out of his house in California's Silicon Valley -- may be revolutionizing how people all over the world will learn math. He is Salman Khan, and until a few months ago he made his living as a hedge fund analyst. But he's become a kind of an unseen rock star in the online instruction field, posting 1200 lessons in math and science on YouTube, none of them lasting more than about 10 minutes. He quit his job at the hedge fund to devote full time to his Khan Academy teaching efforts, which he does essentially for free.Khan explained how the U.S. unemployment rate is calculated in a NewsHour exclusive video.
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It's time for schools to focus on the widening gap in reading and writing skills that leaves so many boys unprepared for success in college or vocational training.As a volunteer in my daughter's kindergarten class, I was asked to help children write a "story" (a few words) to illustrate their pictures. Only one girl needed my writing help; only one boy could write for himself. Nearly all the boys seemed to be a full year behind nearly all the girls in their ability to pay attention, follow directions, control frustrations, sit still, handle a pencil or crayon and do what used to be considered first-grade work.
As reading and writing are pushed down to earlier ages, boys are struggling harder to meet higher expectations, writes Richard Whitmire, a former USA Today reporter, in Why Boys Fail.
"Each year since 1988 the gap between boys' and girls' reading skills has widened a bit more," Whitmire writes. Boys aren't wired for early verbal skills -- and teachers aren't trained in "boy-friendly" techniques to help them catch up.
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Amazingly enough, tomorrow will mark the one-year anniversary of the start of Rough Type's Realtime Chronicles. Time flies, and realtime flies like a bat out of hell.Since I began writing the series, I have received innumerable emails and texts from panicked parents worried that they may be failing in what has become the central challenge of modern parenting: ensuring that children grow up to be well adapted to the realtime environment. These parents are concerned - and rightly so - that their kids will be at a disadvantage in the realtime milieu in which we all increasingly live, work, love, and compete for the small bits of attention that, in the aggregate, define the success, or failure, of our days. If maladapted to realtime existence, these parents understand, their progeny will end up socially ostracized, with few friends and even fewer followers. "Can we even be said to be alive," one agitated young mother wrote me, "if our status updates go unread?" The answer, of course, is no. In the realtime environment, the absence of interactive stimuli, even for brief periods of "time," may result in a state of reflective passivity indistinguishable from nonexistence. On a more practical level, a lack of realtime skills is sure to constrain a young person's long-term job prospects. At best, he or she will be fated to spend his or her days involved in some form of manual labor, possibly even working out of doors with severely limited access to screens. At worst, he or she will have to find a non-tenure-track position in academia.
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In Wisconsin, we have always been proud of our strong education system. New demands and technology are changing the way we prepare our children to enter the 21st century workforce. We must ensure that our state's education system remains a national leader by providing our children with the skills that are needed to compete in a global economy.It has been proven that not every child learns the same way. In fact, some students learn best outside of the traditional bricks-and-mortar school setting. For these children, virtual schools have come to fill an educational need. Virtual schools involve long-distance learning that use computers and Internet connections. These schools employ vigorous and challenging curricula along with regular interaction with state-certified teachers.
However, virtual schools were nearly wiped out in 2007 due to a court challenge by WEAC, the state's teachers union.
In response, in the last legislative session I led the charge to ensure that virtual schools remain an option for Wisconsin's parents and children. A bipartisan compromise was reached to keep the schools open but included a cap of 5,250 students requested by critics until a legislative audit could be conducted.
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Senior House Republicans and Democrats recently announced a new bi-partisan effort to re-authorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. It's a good sign for some real progress, both for education specifically and Washington in general, but there's been no word on whether the Senate is so inclined. The "proposals" put forward so far by the Department of Education and at yesterday's announcement are light on details, so this post is my attempt at rectifying some of the major issues around No Child Left Behind.No More Pass/ Fail
One of the more frequent criticisms of the law concerns its binary pass/ fail system. If a school fails to meet a single academic benchmarks in a single grade in a single subject by a single sub-group of students, it is said to not meet "adequate yearly progress," or AYP. If it does not meet AYP for multiple years in a row, the school is subject to a series of consequences that become more punitive the more years it misses targets.
The strengths of this arrangement came from protecting under-served populations. Because a school would be held accountable for all groups of students, it focused much more attention on achievement gaps and did not let a school hide its problems educating important sub-groups behind school-wide averages.
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Milwaukee School Board member Bruce Thompson:
For Milwaukee Public Schools, the financial crisis that many of us have been warning about is here. As principals get their initial budgets, they are faced with cutting teachers; larger class sizes; the loss of specialty teachers such as those in art, music, physical education; and the lost of librarians. Perversely, schools that have the best student achievement are often the hardest hit, since the middle-class students attracted to these schools bring less aid with them.While many other school systems (and other government units) are also facing cuts brought on by exploding health care costs and the weak economy, MPS has been particularly hard hit. And much of the MPS pain is self-inflicted. Next year, MPS is facing a 77% fringe benefit rate, meaning that the cost to the district of an employee is 77% more than that employee's pay. If the unfunded liability for retiree benefits were correctly included, the fringe benefit rate would rise to almost 104%, meaning that the cost to the school district of an employee is more than twice that employee's pay.
The biggest factor in the exploding benefits cost is the cost of health care. MPS offers two plans, one of which costs MPS twice as much per employee as the other. Yet because MPS pays the full cost of the plans, there is no incentive for employees to pick the less-expensive plan. Employees can retire at age 55 and continue to have MPS pay for their health insurance at the rate it did when they retired. Pensions have an employer and an employee contribution, but MPS pays both parts.
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As Trenton lawmakers gave first approval Thursday to a group of bills to reform the state's public-worker pension and benefits systems, Sen. Jim Whelan, D-Atlantic, tackled the teachers unions, telling them their case for strong state pensions was out-of-date.Shortly before committee members voted to approve three bills and a constitutional resolution, Whelan, who teaches in the Atlantic City school district, told hundreds of assembled public workers -- including dozens of teachers -- that state workers should no longer claim they needed large pensions to make up for low pay.
"I'm of a generation that that was true for," Whelan said at a hearing of the Senate State Government, Wagering, Tourism and Historic Preservation Committee that he chairs.
"Quite bluntly, when I began teaching -- almost 100 years ago, not quite -- we made lousy money, and you were always going to make lousy money. That was true whether you were a teacher, a cop, a fireman, any public employees across the board. We were underpaid," he said.
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Wisconsin Government Accountability Board [22K PDF]:
The Wisconsin Education Association spent $1.5 million in 2009 lobbying state lawmakers, nearly twice as much as the next-largest spender, according to a report from the Government Accountability Board.Complete 80K PDF Report.Overall, lobbying organizations reported spending $36.2 million in 2009, a 5.2 percent increase from the first half of the previous legislative session.
The 2009 report analyzes the activities of 746 lobbying principals and 750 registered lobbyists.
"Not only is Wisconsin's lobbying law strong, but information about lobbying activities is easy to use online," said Kevin J. Kennedy, director and general counsel of the G.A.B. "The law requires disclosure and prohibits gifts to lawmakers. The Board's Eye on Lobbying online database allows the public to keep track of lobbying activities at the Capitol without leaving home."
The most lobbied bill in 2009 was the AB 138, regarding appointment of the secretary of the Natural Resources Board. Organizations reported spending 2,923 hours attempting to influence legislators on that bill.
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Chicago Public Schools' controversial process of closing, consolidating and turning around schools will receive new scrutiny this week.The City Council's Education Committee will hold a hearing Monday on a resolution to impose a one-year moratorium on any such changes, and the Chicago Board of Education is scheduled to vote Wednesday on proposals to close two schools, consolidate two others, turn around five and phase out one. Turnarounds involve replacing new teachers, principals, and other staff while the student body remains intact.
"The process -- from recommendation to the Board of Education vote -- is probably no more than a month," said Alderman Pat Dowell (3rd Ward), who co-sponsored the resolution in response to complaints of too little community involvement. "That's unfair."
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Today's idea: Since written language is merely a technology for storing and transferring information, it's likely to be replaced by a newer technology that performs the same function more effectively, a futurist says.
E Reader on empty bookshelf. This image has been manipulated using Photoshop.The Britannica Blog has a series of posts called Learning and Literacy in the Digital Age, including this one by Patrick Tucker, senior editor of The Futurist. He speculates that text could be rendered obsolete not by the "culture of the image" -- that threat is so last century -- but by the so-called "information age" itself:
... Research into cyber-telepathy has direct ramifications for the written word and its survivability. Electronic circuits mapped out in the same pattern as human neurons could, in decades ahead, reproduce the electrical activity that occurs when our natural transmitters activate. Theoretically, such circuits could allow parts of our brain to communicate with one another at greater levels of efficiency, possibly allowing humans to access data from the Web without looking it up or reading it.
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Teachers and staff members in the Stowe School District have set an example for the rest of the state by agreeing to go without a pay increase built into their contract to help preserve programs and positions threatened by tough economic times.Related: Madison School District & Madison Teachers Union Reach Tentative Agreement: 3.93% Increase Year 1, 3.99% Year 2; Base Rate $33,242 Year 1, $33,575 Year 2: Requires 50% MTI 4K Members and will "Review the content and frequency of report cards".The teachers and staff agreed to forgo a 5.25 percent raise, shaving about $240,000 from the proposed $9.7 million budget. That was enough to save a list of athletic and academic programs, as well as save jobs in the school district.
People tasked with balancing a public budget in the midst of the worst economic downturnin a generation often talk about making difficult decisions. Those who feel the impact of reduced budgets often are quick to argue why their interests deserve to be spared. This is a phenomenon seen from the halls of the Statehouse to budgets meetings in communities throughout the state.
The Stowe teachers took a different tack, choosing to give something up so their colleagues could keep their jobs, and students could keep their classes and teams.
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I attended Harium's Community meeting and the 43rd Dems meeting (partial) yesterday. Here are some updates (add on if you attended either or Michael DeBell's meeting).We covered a fair amount of ground with Harium but a lot on the math ruling/outcomes. Here's what he said:
- the Board will decide what will happen from the math ruling. I asked Harium about who would be doing what because of how the phrasing the district used in their press release - "In addition to any action the School Board may take, the district expects to appeal this decision." It made it sound like the district (1) might do something different from the Board and (2) the district had already decided what they would do. Harium said they misspoke and it was probably the heat of the moment.
- He seems to feel the judge erred. He said they did follow the WAC rules which is what she should have been ruling on but didn't. I probably should go back and look at the complete ruling but it seems like not going by the WAC would open her decision up to be reversed so why would she have done it? He said the issue was that there are statewide consequences to this ruling and that Issaquah and Bellevue (or Lake Washington?) are doing math adoptions and this ruling is troubling. I gently let Harium know that the Board needs to follow the law, needs to be transparent in their decision-making and the district needs to have balanced adoption committees or else this could happen again. No matter how the district or the Board feel, the judge did not throw out the case, did not rule against the plaintiffs but found for them. The ball is in the Board's court and they need to consider this going forward with other decisions.
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On my show last night -- which re-runs at 10pm tonight on FBN -- I said that Washington DC gives voucher schools $7,500 per student, but DC's public schools cost twice that much: $15,000.Related: Education: Too Important for a Government Monopoly. Joanne has more as does Mark Perry.The $15,000 number has been cited by congressmen and newspapers like the WSJ and the Denver Post. It comes from the the National Center for Education Statistics, and the Census.
Unfortunately, it's also wrong. Or at least very misleading, since it ignores major sources of spending. As CATO Education scholar Andrew Coulson explains:
DC also has a "state" level bureaucracy that spends nearly $200 million annually on k-12 programs, and the city spends another $275 million or so on school construction, school facilities modernization, and other so-called "capital" projects.But those aren't included in the regular spending figures.
Locally, the Madison School District has 24,295 students and a 2009/2010 budget of $418,415,780. $17,222 per student. The DC budget morass illustrates the necessity of K-12 budget clarity in all cases, including Madison.
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Sixteen Wisconsin high schools had at least one senior in the Class of 2009 who received the top score on the ACT, ACT Inc. announced this week.The schools with students who received 36s were:
Arrowhead High School in the Town of Merton
Bay City Baptist School in Green Bay
Central Wisconsin Christian High School in Waupun
Edgewood High School in Madison
Fort Atkinson High School
Heritage Christian School in West Allis
Homestead High School in Mequon
Marquette University High School in Milwaukee
Middleton High School
Monona Grove High School in Monona
Neenah High School
Onalaska High School
Oshkosh North High School
Oshkosh West High School
Wauwatosa East High School
West High School in Madison
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L.A. Unified's teachers' union organized protests today and for next week against school district administrators. The union is upset that the superintendent has tentatively allowed outside groups to assume control of new and low-performing campuses.The school district received 85 proposals to run three dozen campuses. Teachers, charter school companies and other nonprofits crafted the plans. The superintendent is recommending teacher and district-written plans for more than half the schools. Outside groups could run another quarter of the schools.
A teacher, parent and student vote earlier this month favored the teacher plans. A nonprofit run by L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa received the recommendation to run Carver Middle School.
Kirsten Ellis, a teacher there, doesn't like the idea. "We demand that the school board and the superintendent adhere to and follow the vote of the people, instead of throwing it out and ignoring it."
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Stephen Kreider, Isaac and Levi Yoder:
Time was running out, so I bought two tickets to Villahermosa, Mexico.Three planes, a bus ride and a hike later, Levi and I are finishing this column among the Mayan pyramids of Palenque. It's about 80 degrees out, and howler monkeys are bellowing from the surrounding jungle.
But this isn't a column about travel. It's about one of the loveliest fringe benefits to having kids: You can use them as an excuse to do stuff you wanted to do yourself but never would have.
Time was running out on a promise I made Levi when he was 7. He has always been keen on history, and he became fascinated with the Mayans.
"Isn't there a pyramid where you can go inside and see the king's grave?" he asked. "Yes, and I've been there!" I said. "How about you and I go there some winter break soon?"
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A rich history. Energetic, sweet students, including several kindergartners who spontaneously gave me hugs. Teachers and administrators who want to succeed. A good building. I enjoyed my visit to Harambee Community School, and I'd like to feel bad about what the school is facing now.But I don't.
Harambee faces its end, after 40 years. And it's hard to reach any conclusion other than that it is the fault of leaders of the school.
If efforts to bring more quality to Milwaukee schools are going to mean anything, a central pillar has to be accountability or, to put it another way, taking a firm line on schools that don't measure up, be they voucher, charter, or conventional public schools.
In a tough love sort of way, if Harambee closes after this school year, this probably will be a success for those saying high-needs children need better than what they are getting.
A law passed by the Legislature in 2006 was perfectly clear: To stay in Milwaukee's private school voucher program and receive large sums of money from the state, a school had to get accredited by Dec. 31, 2009.
Three and a half years later, it was Dec. 31, 2009, and every school that was covered by the requirement had either succeeded or closed, except one: Harambee.
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The New Jersey Education Association makes it easy to conclude that most public school teachers in New Jersey are lousy or mediocre. They must be, because they're willing to settle for the same pay the lazy, unprepared and uninspiring slug in the chaotic classroom across the hall is getting.The NJEA -- the union for most of New Jersey's public school teachers -- refused to back the state's application for hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid because the Rise to the Top program demands that teachers tie their pay to measurable student performance.
President Obama has endorsed merit pay, but the NJEA, as expected, has come up with many reasons why this is a bad idea. Of course it won't propose its own merit-pay formula, because the NJEA is against any form of merit pay.
The union doesn't want teacher pay tied to testing because a teacher could be penalized if "a kid was up all night playing video games" or "didn't have breakfast," NJEA president Barbara Keshishian recently told The Star-Ledger editorial board. That's a silly argument, because no one would suggest tying a salary to a single test, but those are the kinds of silly arguments the NJEA makes.
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With a little over a month before the Right to Education Act is notified, union human resource development minister Kapil Sibal said that his ministry would hold consultations with the states to resolve issues such as fee structure and teachers' salaries, that are likely to arise while implementing the Act. Stressing that the government will take steps to prevent commercialisation of education, Mr Sibal said that the consultation would be undertaken to evolve a policy so that "poor, marginalised, and disadvantaged" students are not adversely affected."Our aim is to ensure that all children in India get quality education, but we are against commercialisation of education. Incessant hike of fee and overcharging from parents is something we do not support. I will talk to every state government on issues regarding implementation of the RTE Act from April 1. I will be meeting Delhi chief minister Sheila Diskhit on Monday regarding the same," the minister said. Mr Sibal drew special attention to the need to provide some relaxation to "marginal" schools, which are currently not recognised. The RTE makes it mandatory for all schools to be recognised. While state laws, such as that of Delhi, require that all recognised schools pay teachers according to government scales, and tuition fees of schools be regulated.
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Most American schoolchildren learn about Islam in a social studies classroom. But at the Friends School in Baltimore, eighth-graders make their own mini-pilgrimage every year, to the Islamic Center in Washington, D.C.As their bus rattles along the highway south to Washington, most of the kids are busy making up songs about each other. But 12-year-old Julia Potter is counting off the Five Pillars of Islam on her fingers: charity, prayer, fasting, profession of faith, and the pilgrimage to Mecca.
These kids are well-versed in the basics of Islam and more: In class, they learn about Judaism, Hinduism and Christianity; about prophets, taboos and holy laws. And every year, eighth-graders visit the Islamic Center -- though every year, according to teacher Deloris Jones, they get there late. "There's absolutely nothing over the years I have been able to do to keep this thing on time," Jones says.
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Which brings us to this next item, one with twist and turns not completely understandable at this point, but certainly not held up by people like myself as a model of how to "get the job properly done" -- to use Herbert's words.None of this is terribly surprising (See the Sunlight Foundation's excellent work on the Obama Administration's insider dealings with PhRMA). Jeff Henriques did a lot of work looking at the Madison School District's foray into Small Learning Communities.Diane Ravitch, an intellectual on education policy, difficult to pigeonhole politically (appointed to public office by both G.H.W. Bush and Clinton), but best described as an independent, co-writes a blog with Deborah Meier that some of our readers may be familiar with called "Bridging Differences." This past week she highlighted a possibly disturbing development in the Race to the Top competition program of the Department of Education, that dangles $4.3 billion to the states with a possible $1.3 billion to follow. Ravitch's critique suggests that this competition is not run by pragmatists, but rather by ideologues who are led by the Bill Gates Foundation.
If this election had been held five years ago, the department would be insisting on small schools, but because Gates has already tried and discarded that approach, the department is promoting the new Gates remedies: charter schools, privatization, and evaluating teachers by student test scores.Two of the top lieutenants of the Gates Foundation were placed in charge of the competition by Secretary Arne Duncan. Both have backgrounds as leaders in organisations dedicated to creating privately managed schools that operate with public money.
Is it possible to change the current K-12 bureacracy from within? Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman spoke about the "adult employment" focus of the K-12 world:
"Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk - the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It's as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands." Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI's vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the "impossibility" of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars ("Similar to GM"; "worry" about the children given this situation).I suspect that Duncan and many others are trying to significantly change the adult to student process, rather than simply pumping more money into the current K-12 monopoly structures.
They are to be commended for this.
Will there be waste, fraud and abuse? Certainly. Will there be waste fraud and abuse if the funds are spent on traditional K-12 District organizations? Of course. John Stossel notes that when one puts together the numbers, Washington, DC's schools spend $26,000 per student, while they provide $7,500 to the voucher schools.....
We're better off with diffused governance across the board. Milwaukee despite its many travails, is developing a rich K-12 environment.
The Verona school board narrowly approved a new Mandarin immersion charter school on a 4-3 vote recently These citizen initiatives offer some hope for new opportunities for our children. I hope we see more of this.
Finally, all of this presents an interesting contrast to what appears to be the Madison School District Administration's ongoing "same service" governance approach.
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It wasn't until I was in my 50s that I realized how restricted my high school reading lists had been and how little they had changed for my three children. They were enthusiastic readers, as my wife and I were. But all, or almost all, of the required books for both generations were fiction.I am not dismissing the delights of Twain, Crane, Buck, Saroyan and Wilder, all of which I read in high school. But I think I also would have enjoyed Theodore H. White, John Hersey, Barbara Tuchman and Bruce Catton if they had been assigned.
Could that be changing? Maybe rebellious teens these days are fleeing Faulkner, Hemingway, Austen and Baldwin, or whoever is on the 12th grade English list, and furtively reading Malcolm Gladwell, David McCullough, Doris Kearns Goodwin and other nonfiction stars.
Sadly, no. The Renaissance Learning company released a list of what 4.6 million students read in the 2008-09 school year, based on its Accelerated Reader program, which encourages children to choose their own books. J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter has given way to the hormonal allure of Stephenie Meyer's teen vampire books, but both school and non-school books are still almost all fiction.
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As I watch the debates and political maneuvering around the proposed Edgewater development, it is hard not to consider ALL of the repercussions of the decisions that will be made before this is all over. One of the most invisible aspects of the debate is how TIF financing will affect the already-strained finances of Madison's public schools.
No matter where one lands on the question of how many permanent jobs will be created, the right of people to be heard on development issues that affect their neighborhoods, the value of historic preservation, or public financing for private development, there is one issue that should be made visible to all parties: the TIF financing package is going to hurt the tax base available to our public schools until the TIF is closed out (which could be over 20 years from now).
While proponents of TIF financing rightly assert that TIF increases property value and by extension increases the tax base for the jurisdictions that levy property taxes, there is a hidden side that is rarely discussed publicly in the crush to jump on the "pro-economic development" bandwagon: that benefit does not become available until the district is closed. While districts often close earlier, they may remain open for over 20 years. The benefit does not accrue for years down the road, and in the meantime the value of the affected properties is frozen at the start year of the district.
Not to worry, says the Department of Revenue:
In many areas the school levy represents the biggest portion of the local property tax bill, so it is not a surprise that a large portion of tax increment revenues comes from the school levy. This doesn't mean that schools don't get the money they need, however. The school levy that goes toward the tax increment is levied on top of the taxes they need to operate. The school levy is subject to the revenue caps, but within those constraints the schools get all the money they require. The tax increment makes the levy higher than it would otherwise be, but only for as long as the district has a TID in it. Once the TID is closed the larger tax base can help to reduce the tax burden on district residents. (emphasis added)
In other words, the Department of Revenue adopts the same posture adopted by the Joint Finance Committee when it went forward with the plan that left Madison with the biggest cut in state aid to any Wisconsin district: "It's OK. Schools don't need to be hurt because districts can raise property taxes to cover the revenue that they lost." This leaves the dirty work to school districts, who must choose between raising taxes and hurting property owners during a recession, or cutting programs and adding to the damage done by successive years of cuts since Wisconsin's revenue caps went into effect in 1993.
The Double Whammy
In the case of the Edgewater, and the recently-approved expansion of the capitol square TID #23, Madison Metropolitan School District gets a double whammy of revenue loss. How does this work and what does it mean?
Full post at http://lucymathiak.blogspot.com/
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Madison School Board member Ed Hughes sent me an e-mail pointing out another vexing problem with Wisconsin's school funding system and how it penalizes the Madison district, which I've written about in the past. Hughes notes in his e-mail "This particular wrinkle of the state school financing system is truly nuts."The complete text of Ed Hughes letter to Senator Risser:
Hughes is incensed that the IQ Academy, a virtual school operated by the Waukesha district, gets over $6000 in state aid for poaching students from the Madison district while total state aid for educating a student in a real school here at home is $3400. Waukesha makes a profit of about $500 per student at the expense of taxpayers here, Hughes says. And that's including profits going to the national corporate IQ Academy that supplies the school's programming.
Sen. Risser:Amy Hetzner noted this post on her blog:As if we needed one, here is another reason to be outraged by our state school financing system:
This week's issue of Isthmus carries a full page ad on page 2. It is sponsored by "IQ Academy Wisconsin," which is described as a "tuition-free, online middle and high school program of the School District of Waukesha, WI." The ad invites our Madison students to open-enroll in their "thriving learning community."
What's in it for Waukesha? A report on virtual charter schools by the State Fiscal Bureau, released this week, sheds some light on this. The Madison school district gets a little more than $2,000 in general state aid for each of our students. If you include categorical aids and everything else from the state, the amount goes up to about $3,400/student.
However, if Waukesha (or any other school district) is successful in poaching one of our students, it will qualify for an additional $6,007 in state aid. (That was actually the amount for the 2007-08 school year, that last year for which data was available for the Fiscal Bureau report.) As it was explained to me by the author of the Fiscal Bureau report, this $6,007 figure is made up of some combination of additional state aid and a transfer of property taxes paid by our district residents to Waukesha.So the state financing system will provide nearly double the amount of aid to a virtual charter school associated with another school district to educate a Madison student than it will provide to the Madison school district to educate the same student in an actual school, with you know, bricks and mortar and a gym and cafeteria and the rest.
The report also states that the Waukesha virtual school spends about $5,500 per student. So for each additional student it enrolls, the Waukesha district makes at least a $500 profit. (It's actually more than that, since the incremental cost of educating one additional student is less than the average cost for the district.) This does not count the profit earned by the private corporation that sells the on-line programming to Waukesha.
The legislature has created a system that sets up very strong incentives for a school district to contract with some corporate on-line operation, open up a virtual charter school, and set about trying to poach other districts' students. Grantsburg, for example, has a virtual charter school that serves not a single resident of the Grantsburg school district. What a great policy.
By the way, Waukesha claims in its Isthmus ad that "Since 2004, IQ Academy Wisconsin students have consistently out-performed state-wide and district averages on the WKCE and ACT tests." I didn't check the WKCE scores, but last year 29.3% of the IQ Academy 12th graders took the ACT test and had an average composite score of 22.9. In the Madison school district, 56.6% of 12th graders took the test and the district average composite score was 24.0.
I understand that you are probably tired of hearing from local school board members complaining about the state's school funding system. But the enormous disparity between what the state will provide to a virtual charter school for enrolling a student living in Madison, as compared to what it will provide the Madison school district to educate the same student, is so utterly wrong-headed as to be almost beyond belief.
Ed HughesMadison School Board
An interesting side note: the Madison Metropolitan School District's current business manager, Erik Kass, was instrumental to helping to keep Waukesha's virtual high school open and collecting a surplus when he was the business manager for that district.I found the following comments interesting:
An interesting note is that the complainers never talked about which system more effectively taught students.Madison is spending $418,415,780 to educate 24,295 students ($17,222 each).Then again, it has never really been about the students.
Related: Madison School District 2010-2011 Budget: Comments in a Vacuum? and a few comments on the recent "State of the Madison School District" presentation.
The "Great Recession" has pushed many organizations to seek more effective methods of accomplishing their goals. It would seem that virtual learning and cooperation with nearby higher education institutions would be ideal methods to provide more adult to student services at reduced cost, rather than emphasizing growing adult to adult spending.
Finally Richard Zimman's recent Madison Rotary talk is well worth revisiting with respect to the K-12 focus on adult employment.
Fascinating.
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Nearly six months after the state announced it was scrapping its annual test for public school students, efforts to replace it with a new assessment are on hold and state officials now estimate it will take at least three years to make the switch.The WKCE (Wisconsin Knowledge & Concepts Exam) has been criticized for its lack of rigor. The Madison School District is using the WKCE as the basis for its value added assessment initiative.The reason for the delay is tied to what is happening in the national education scene.
Wisconsin is among the 48 states that have signed onto the Common Core State Standards Initiative, which expects to complete work on grade-by-grade expectations for students in English and math by early spring. Once that is done, the anticipation is that the state will adopt the new standards, using them to help craft the new statewide test.
Wisconsin officials also are planning to compete for part of $350 million that the U.S. Education Department plans to award in the fall to state consortiums for test development.
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"What's a court doing making a decision on math textbooks and curriculum?" This question and its associated harrumphs on various education blogs and online newspapers came in reaction to the February 4, 2010 ruling from the Superior court of King County that the Seattle school board's adoption of a discovery type math curriculum for high school was "arbitrary and capricious".In fact, the court did not rule on the textbook or curriculum. Rather, it ruled on the school board's process of decision making--more accurately, the lack thereof. The court ordered the school board to revisit the decision. Judge Julie Spector found that the school board ignored key evidence--like the declaration from the state's Board of Education that the discovery math series under consideration was "mathematically unsound", the state Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction not recommending the curriculum and last but not least, information given to the board by citizens in public testimony.
The decision is an important one because it highlights what parents have known for a long time: School boards generally do what they want to do, evidence be damned. Discovery type math programs are adopted despite parent protests, despite evidence of experts and--judging by the case in Seattle--despite findings from the State Board of Education and the Superintendent of Public Instruction.
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First-year elementary school teachers must take a "generalist" exam to be in compliance with federal standards. The Texas Education Agency has successfully fought for a waiver that would exempt fine-arts teachers from the test.While I certainly realize the time and expense involved in testing as many as 30,000 new teachers statewide and understand TEA's desire to cut that number, I feel that such an exemption is a big mistake.
Elementary school is a time when children learn about the world around them and make connections between subjects. More detailed instruction in various disciplines comes at the secondary level. With the current emphasis on testing in math, reading, science and social studies, classroom teachers find themselves working to see that basic concepts in each of these subjects are learned by their students. Time constraints make lessons with numerous "connections" difficult to achieve.
What better place to weave many subjects together than in the music or art class? I have always chosen to teach this way but have discovered than many music teachers do not, perhaps because they do not see the necessity or because they may not see the connections themselves. A test of general knowledge may help.
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I have been exchanging emails with Gabe Rose, communications director of something called the Parent Revolution in my home state, California. Rose and his organization are part of a movement that has, to my open-mouthed amazement, persuaded the state government to give parents the power to close or change the leadership of low-performing public schools.It sounds great. It has many parents excited. It could shake up the state educational establishment, including the education department, school boards and teacher unions. They could use some shaking up.
Yet I can't shake my feeling it is a bad idea, a confusing distraction that will bring parents more frustration, not less, and do little to improve their children's educations.
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A fresh, educational reform is sweeping the U.S. and leaving Vermont in the Jurassic period of traditional public schools. What is this reform and why haven't many MMU students heard of this?The terms public school and private school are terms that are familiar to all of us. There is nothing foreign to us about the concept (or the practice) of public schools. Something that is not so familiar is the idea of a charter school. Many MMU teens have no idea what a charter school even is. An interviewed sophomore asked if charter schools were "private schools that public people went to," that student was by far closer than most MMU students. There has been a fast-paced change in education over the past several years and while many states have jumped on the bandwagon, Vermont hasn't even come close. That change is the development of charter schools.
The U.S .Charter Schools website defines charter schools as "innovative public schools providing choices for families and greater accountability for results." In other words, they are schools that have been granted a charter exempting themselves from selective state or local rules, while still adhering to the basic educational laws. Their purpose is to build strong communities, to focus on the kids and their needs as well as the make sure each child has the access to a quality education.
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Electronic Frontier Foundation:
After several years of false starts, the universe of digital books seems at last poised to expand dramatically. Readers should view this expansion with both excitement and wariness. Excitement because digital books could revolutionize reading, making more books more findable and more accessible to more people in more ways than ever before. Wariness because the various entities that will help make this digital book revolution possible may not always respect the rights and expectations that readers, authors, booksellers and librarians have built up, and defended, over generations of experience with physical books.As new digital book tools and services roll out, we need to be able to evaluate not only the cool features they offer, but also whether they extend (or hamper) our rights and expectations.
The over-arching question: are digital books as good or better than physical books at protecting you and your rights as a reader?
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After years of complaints from parents, the San Francisco Unified School District has just taken a serious step toward revamping its well-meaning but labyrinthine student-assignment system, which decides the educational homes for tens of thousands of children.The current system -- designed to meet the terms of a settlement in a long-fought federal desegregation case -- involves a complicated computer algorithm that creates student "profiles," using various economic and educational factors, with the aim of sending students of different backgrounds to the same schools.
It has resulted instead in more segregation and has aggravated parents to a point where efforts to manipulate the system have become endemic.
This month, the school district rolled out a new plan. It is designed to more closely consider proximity between a student's home and classroom. It is to be applied to every child headed for kindergarten.
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Sitting on the desk of the secretary of education are dozens of ideas bold enough to finally start solving our country's education crisis. They are contained in applications by 40 states and the District of Columbia for grants from the Race to the Top fund, a $4.35 billion piece of the stimulus package designed to dramatically improve student achievement.Congress established strong guidelines to guarantee that states spend Race to the Top money on audacious reforms. Many states responded with equal fortitude, submitting proposals to radically improve how they use data or to adopt college- and career-ready standards -- concepts that used to be considered third rails in the world of education. Never before has this country had such an opportunity to remake the way we teach young people.
One reason I am so optimistic about these developments is because, after decades of diffuse reform efforts, they all zero in on the most important ingredient of a great education: effective teachers. The key to helping students learn is making sure that every child has an effective teacher every single year.
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The St. Peter School Board has directed district administration to identify $500,000, or even $1.2 million, in possible expenditure reductions.Board members said they are trying to be proactive as the State of Minnesota deals with its own budget deficit of more than $1 billion.
The vast majority of funding to school districts flows from the State of Minnesota.
Superintendent Dr. Jeffrey Olson said the state provides close to 80 percent of District 508's funding.
School districts throughout Minnesota are bracing for cuts in state funding.
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If Madison Avenue met Madison public schools, imagine the possibilities:Ideally, everything an organization does improves its brand. Today's wonderful solo ensemble is a great example of a subtle, positive student, parent and faculty event.
Billboards touting the joys of high school algebra?TV spots selling fifth-grade science?
Facebook updates on student test scores?It's not quite a case of "Extreme Makeover," but the Madison School District needs to put some polish on its image, officials say. The word is out to marketing firms that the district would like some help, and officials are asking the public - particularly parents of school-aged children - to join them at Marquette-O'Keeffe Schools on Monday night to brainstorm on "positive branding" techniques.
The desire to spiff up the public perception of Madison schools came out of months of discussions last year as a community team formed a five-year strategic plan for the district, said Superintendent Dan Nerad.
I'd rather see the Administration and Board focus on substantive improvements than simple "messages". Doc Searls is right on: "there is no demand for messages". Verona's recent approval of a Mandarin immersion charter school resonates far more with parents than spending precious dollars on messages.
Send your thoughts to the Madison School Board: board@madison.k12.wi.us
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The government-school establishment has said the same thing for decades: Education is too important to leave to the competitive market. If we really want to help our kids, we must focus more resources on the government schools.Locally, the Madison School District has 24,295 students and a 2009/2010 budget of $418,415,780. $17,222 per student.But despite this mantra, the focus is on something other than the kids. When The Washington Post asked George Parker, head of the Washington, D.C., teachers union, about the voucher program there, he said: "Parents are voting with their feet. ... As kids continue leaving the system, we will lose teachers. Our very survival depends on having kids in D.C. schools so we'll have teachers to represent."
How revealing is that?
Since 1980, government spending on education, adjusted for inflation, has nearly doubled. But test scores have been flat for decades.
Today we spend a stunning $11,000 a year per student -- more than $200,000 per classroom. It's not working. So when will we permit competition and choice, which works great with everything else? I'll explore those questions on my Fox Business program tomorrow night at 8 and 11 p.m. Eastern time (and again Friday at 10 p.m.).
The people who test students internationally told us that two factors predict a country's educational success: Do the schools have the autonomy to experiment, and do parents have a choice?
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Key Curriculum Press is in quite a snit over the Court's decision about the high school textbooks.Much more on the recent successful community vs. Seattle School District Discovery Math court case here.
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School Supt. Frances Gallo and the city's teachers union gave conflicting accounts Thursday of how talks to reform the struggling Central Falls High School broke down last week, leading to the dramatic decision to fire the entire staff.Gallo said she offered the high school's 74 teachers "100-percent job security" for the 2010-11 school year, if they'd agree to her six conditions to transform the low-performing school.
But teachers union President Jane Sessums said that while the issue of job security certainly came up in negotiations, Gallo never promised to protect every job.
In the wake of their failure to reach agreement, Gallo mailed letters Thursday afternoon to every teacher at Central Falls High School informing them that she is recommending their termination at the end of the current school year. The school district's Board of Trustees will vote on Gallo's recommendation Feb. 23.
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Nick Anderson & Michael Birnbaum:
The lure of $4 billion in federal funding at a time of fiscal peril has driven state after state toward school reforms long considered politically unlikely, undoable or unthinkable. This week, Maryland provided the latest surprise: Gov. Martin O'Malley, who is seeking union support for reelection, proposed tighter rules for teachers to qualify for tenure and opened the door to broader use of test scores to evaluate them.Many teachers view such policies with deep skepticism despite a national movement to overhaul public education's seniority system. Until recently, there was no reason to think Maryland would join the movement because the state has high-performing public schools and strong unions. O'Malley (D) initially hesitated to propose any changes. But the governor shifted course, hoping to boost Maryland's chances at snaring as much as $250 million in President Obama's Race to the Top competition.
"Who fights money?" asked Clara Floyd, president of the Maryland State Education Association, a teachers union.
The contest has catalyzed action from coast to coast to expand charter schools, lay the groundwork for teacher performance pay, revise employee evaluation methods and even consider the first common academic standards. Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R), also seeking reelection, said it added up to too much federal intrusion in local affairs and pulled his state out of the competition. But O'Malley aims for Maryland to apply in June.
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A new report on the rapid proliferation of small schools in New York City finds that while the schools have expanded students' options, most students choose to attend larger schools.Complete report: 3.4MB PDF.Commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the report is one of four that will eventually be released in order to study how the schools have multiplied, who is attending them, who is teaching in them, and whether they're succeeding. The Gates Foundation popularized and funded the small schools movement in New York, fueling the growth of nearly 200 small schools with a $150 million investment.
A New-York based research group, MDRC, conducted the report, which does not look at the schools' academic record -- that analysis will come out in spring -- but focuses on the schools' enrollment and demographics.
One of the report's key findings is that the small schools are seeing modest demand from students.
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Have your kids ever gotten an A for work that you, or they, didn't think was worthwhile? Something like that happened recently with Education Secretary Arne Duncan.The National Center for Fair & Open Testing.Education historian and New York University Professor Diane Ravitch gave him an A for effectiveness at getting buy-in for linking teacher evaluations to student test scores and a D- for pushing bad ideas. I would forgo the A and lower the grade to an F for pushing ideas that are destructive.
Why destructive? At first blush, rewarding teachers for higher student test scores seems reasonable to many people. The second and third blushes are the problem.
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The Public Policy Forum, via a kind reader's email:
Between the 2008-09 and 2009-10 school years, fewer new schools joined the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) than ever before. In addition, 14 MPCP schools closed and another three schools merged--the most year-over- year closures the program has seen (Chart 1).Milwaukee Voucher Schools - 2010.In this 12th edition of the Public Policy Forum's annual census of MPCP schools, we find 112 schools are participating in the choice program, enrolling 21,062 students using taxpayer-funded tuition vouchers. The number of full-time equivalent students using vouchers is greater than in any other year of the program's 19-year history; however, there are fewer schools participating today than earlier this decade (Chart 2, page 2).
The decline in the number of new schools and the increase in the number of closed schools are likely due to new state regulations governing the program. These regulations require schools new to the program to obtain pre-accreditation before opening and require existing schools to become accredited within three years of joining the program.
Throughout this decade, the average number of schools new to the program had been 11 per year. Under the new pre- accreditation requirement, 19 schools applied for pre-accreditation, but just three were approved. Another 38 schools had previously indicated to state regulators an intent to participate in the program in 2009-2010, but did not apply for pre -accreditation. The pre-accreditation process is conducted by the Institute for the Transformation of Learning (ITL) at Marquette University.
Complete report: 184K PDF, press release: 33K PDF
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Susan Troller, via a kind reader's email
Will Morton was a happy, creative and enthusiastic child until he went to kindergarten.Learning Differences Network and Wisconsin State Reading Association.As his classmates sounded out letters, and began reading words and simple sentences, he fell behind. His teacher was perplexed by Will's lack of progress because he was clearly bright and had plenty of exposure to books and language at home. And his parents were worried, because Will's older brother and sister had learned to read easily.
"We knew nothing about reading problems because we hadn't ever had any experience with them, but I remember wondering in kindergarten if he was dyslexic because he seemed to have trouble recognizing letters and associating them with sounds," says Chris Morton, Will's mother. "His teacher told us not to worry, that it was a little developmental delay and we needed to give him time and he'd be fine."
But she was wrong, experts on dyslexia say.Students like Will - who have persistent trouble reading because the neural pathways in their brains do not decode letters and sounds in the ways that make reading and writing natural - need specific help, they say, and the sooner the better. Without that kind of help, they will never catch up, and even if they manage to disguise their different learning style, they are likely to continue to struggle with reading, spelling, language and sometimes with math; in short, they won't ever achieve their full intellectual potential.
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Deborah Gist & Pamela Reinsel Cotter:
Deborah Gist: Chasm: Seniority is no longer a way in which teachers will be selected and assigned in our state. I sent a letter to all superintendents last fall to remind them that the Basic Education Program Regulation in going in effect this summer, and seniority policies would be inconsistent with that regulation. Unfortunately, state statute requires that layoffs be done on a "first in, first out" policy. Legislation would be required to change that, and I would wholeheartedly support it if it were introduced. I will do whatever is necessary to ensure that the very highest quality teacher is in every classroom in our state.Clusty Search: Deborah Gist. Deborah Gist's website and Twitter account.Deborah Gist: I can't imagine how any district or school leader could interpret my words or actions to be anything other than ensuring the top quality, so "change for change's sake" would be contradictory to that.
Bob: Please run for governor. I love your go getter attitude!
Deborah Gist: I appreciate your support very much. Make sure to keep watching and hold me accountable for results!
Parent: As a parent of 2 children, I know how crucial parent involvement is. Has anyone looked at educating the parents of the kids of these failing schools? You can replace the teachers....and you can give new teachers incentives to change things around. But this is a band aid. Teachers are blamed for too many problems. They can't be expected to solve the problems of society. Teachers have many many challenges these days- more so than 25 years ago. Kis and parents need to take responsibility for on education. Just look at math grades around the state. Kids don't know how to deal with fractions because they don't know how to tell time on an analgoue clock. But the teachers are blamed. Let's take a look at the real problems. Educate the kids - the parents- look around the country at other programs. Please don't make this mistake.
Deborah Gist: Parent involvement is important, and supportive, engaged parents are important partners in a child's education. Fortunately, we know that great teaching can overcome those instances when children have parents who are unable to provide that level of support. I don't blame teachers, but I do hold them accountable for results. I also hold myself and everyone on my team accountable.
Matt: Will you apologize for repeatedly saying that "we recruit the majority of our teachers from the bottom third of high school students going to college"? The studies that you cite do not back this up.
Deborah Gist: Matt: As a traditionally trained teacher, I know this is difficult to hear. I don't like it either. Unfortunately, it is true. While there are many extraordinarily intelligent educators throughout Rhode Island and our country, the US--unlike other high performing countries--recruits our teachers from the lowest performers in our secondary schools based on SAT scores and other performance data.
Deborah Gist: If you have a source that shows otherwise, I'd love to see that. I'm always open to learning new resources. So, I'd be happy for you to share that.
A must read.
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The September 1994 issue of NEA Today, the monthly newspaper published by the National Education Association, reports the "resolutions" adopted by delegates to their 1994 Representative Assembly. Below is a small sampling from the 302 resolutions that were passed this year. (One of the resolutions listed is not among those adopted by the NEA. See if you can figure out which one it is.)The resolution that didn't make it is "Professionalism and Accountability".Arbor Day Education
Repatriation of Native American Remains
Left-Handed Students
Professionalism and Accountability
Genocide
Competency Testing and Evaluation
World Hunger
Statehood for the District of Columbia
Violence Against and Exploitation of Asian/Pacific Islanders
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According to the filings in Blake J Robbins v Lower Merion School District (PA) et al, the laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools' administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families. The issue came to light when the Robbins's child was disciplined for "improper behavior in his home" and the Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence. The suit is a class action, brought on behalf of all students issued with these machines.If true, these allegations are about as creepy as they come. I don't know about you, but I often have the laptop in the room while I'm getting dressed, having private discussions with my family, and so on. The idea that a school district would not only spy on its students' clickstreams and emails (bad enough), but also use these machines as AV bugs is purely horrifying.
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A major part of Gov. Bob Riley's final year agenda, the legalization of charter schools, has been killed by the Alabama Legislature.The Senate Finance and Taxation-Education Committee voted 13-4 Wednesday to kill the Senate version of Riley's charter school bill. The House Education Appropriations Committee voted 13-2 last week to kill the House version of the bill.
"I would pretty much conclude it has no chance for the rest of the session," a proponent, state Superintendent Joe Morton, said after the vote Wednesday.
An opponent, teacher lobbyist Paul Hubbert, agreed the issue is gone "for this year," but he said it may be back after the 2010 state elections.
Riley blamed the defeat on Hubbert's Alabama Education Association.
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The Milpitas Unified School District is preparing for the next in the series of continuing shock waves that has been hitting education hard and rippling throughout California.Milpitas 2009-2010 budget: 4.5MB PDF.The latest response comes after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's budget proposal, which could widen the deficit from $1.5 million to nearly $7 million if passed, in the 2011-12 school year for the Milpitas Unified School District alone.
District staff is advancing plans to garner enough support to pass a parcel tax expected to bring in $1.4 million to $1.6 million annually for five years, if passed in the June election. But even if this passes, the district will still be left with a large hole to fill.
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Posted by Jim Zellmer at 1:51 AM Subscribe to this site via RSS/Atom:
Tyler Whitley & Olympia Meola:
Gov. Bob McDonnell wants to fill a $2 billion budget shortfall by eliminating more than 500 jobs over three years, instituting 10 furlough days for state workers and slashing services for children and the sick.But he proposes no new taxes, and he is electing to keep the $950 million-a-year car-tax break for localities.
The governor also wants to spare higher education from further cuts and seeks to restore some of former Gov. Timothy M. Kaine's proposed cuts to public safety.
Schools and health care -- the largest parts of the state's general fund budget -- take heavy hits under McDonnell's plan, with reductions of $731 million to public education over the two-year budget period, and more than $300 million to health-care programs.
"All the cuts give me heartburn," McDonnell said at a news conference. "All of them were difficult because I know that behind every cut there is a Virginian . . . that might be affected."
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Less than half of California school districts and only about a quarter of teacher unions have promised to make key education reforms required for the state to win $700 million in competitive federal grants, officials said Wednesday.Only 41 percent of school districts and 60 percent of eligible charter schools signed on for changes needed to participate in the Obama administration's Race to the Top contest in which states can win extra federal funding to ease the impact of steep budget cuts.
Still, state education officials were hopeful California would be among the states chosen in April to share about $4.35 billion. Officials note that districts agreeing to the reforms represent 58 percent of the state's public school students and almost 61 percent of students from low-income families.
"We're very pleased with the turnout," said Hilary McLean, spokeswoman for the California Department of Education. "We think we have a very strong application. We're competitive."
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Janie Scull & Michael Petrilli:
This new analysis by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute finds that more than 1.7 million American children attend what we've dubbed "private public schools" -- public schools that serve virtually no poor students. In some metropolitan areas, as many as one in six public-school students -- and one in four white youngsters -- attends such schools, of which the U.S. has about 2,800. Read on to see whether there's one in your neighborhood.Complete PDF Report.
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State and federal leaders are touting charter schools as key to education reform, but advocates say the movement needs more public funding to grow in New Jersey."It's politically expedient to talk about charter schools," said Rex Shaw, lead person at the Teaneck Community Charter School. "But show me the money."
Governor Christie has been a vocal supporter of the schools, which act independently of local districts even though they are publicly financed. But his office was mum on whether more money would be available to spur the movement.
At their best, charters serve as laboratories for innovation -- trying new approaches without the restraints of union rules and administrative orthodoxy.
But the schools have been slow to catch on in most of New Jersey -- hampered by a lack of money and interest in a state where the public schools generally are considered good. Nearly 80 percent of the 68 charters now operating are in urban areas where the local districts are struggling, if not failing.
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In recent years, the Hamilton Township School District has set about silently taking in relatives of board of education members and high-ranking administrators, with the district serving as a paying home-away-from-home-until-retirement home. There, kin can gently labor beneath a motto borrowing on the formula E=mc², "Everything is Relative," and bond with one another in an exclusive patronage pool. A family welfare system is in the making.More from New Jersey Left Behind.Privately, I have wanted this stealth project to fail. My mindset is not entirely propriety-driven; like a lot of people, I am tempted to bend principle to become principal. Other forces at work are envy and money. I am unrelated to any board member or administrator, so I can't enjoy the relative benefits. I am also a taxpayer in the district and have to shoulder its costs. I am a double loser -- no money coming into my pocket all the while money is being emptied from it.
Nevertheless, I feel compelled to express publicly my admiration of the district's ability to engineer its version of relativity into a family support system . A greater utopia I am hard-pressed to imagine. Let me offer supporting facts. In 2003, only one of the nine members of the board had any relatives working in the district. He had three, so he might be regarded as a pioneer of the project. By 2008, five members were relative-on-board, with a total of seven employed in the district. In 2009, while the number of members with family in-district dropped to four, the total of employed relatives remained at six. Meanwhile, the superintendent and two assistants were also nurturing the value of paid family togetherness. In 2003, they contributed five relatives to the district; by 2009, the number had doubled to 10.
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Governor Bob Wise & Robert Rothman340K PDF:
In his blockbuster best-selling book, writer Malcolm Gladwell identified a phenomenon called ―the tipping point.‖ This point marks the level at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable and something happens that, in either large or small measure, turns the world on its axis. For those who have been working to improve education, it appears that the tipping point may have finally arrived.Via the Alliance for Excellent Education.Currently, K-12 education in the United States is dealing with three major crises, each of which on its own is capable of wreaking havoc on schools and communities around the nation, but together are an all-out perfect storm. Simultaneously, the U.S. education system is facing
These three factors have brought our education system to a point where the need for change and innovation is no longer something to be researched and discussed. We must do what people have done for centuries and turn crisis into opportunity, somehow making progress in the face of enormous challenges.
- global skill demands vs. educational attainment;
- the funding cliff;
- and a looming teacher shortage.
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Sally made 500 gingerbread men. She sold 3/4 of them and gave away 2/5 of the remainder. How many did she give away?Related: Math Forum Audio / Video.This was one of the homework questions in Craig Parsley's fifth-grade class. The kids are showing their answers on the overhead projector. They are in a fun mood, using class nicknames. First up is "Crackle," a boy. The class hears from "Caveman," "Annapurna," "Shortcut" and "Fred," a girl.
Each has drawn a ruler with segments labeled by number -- on the problem above, "3/4," "2/5" and "500." Below the ruler is some arithmetic and an answer.
"Who has this as a single mathematical expression? Who has the guts?" Parsley asks. No one, yet -- but they will.
This is not the way math is taught in other Seattle public schools. It is Singapore Math, adopted from the Asian city-state whose kids test at the top of the world. Since the 2007-08 year, Singapore Math has been taught at Schmitz Park Elementary in West Seattle -- and only there in the district.
In the war over school math -- in which a judge recently ordered Seattle Public Schools to redo its choice of high-school math -- Schmitz Park is a redoubt or, it hopes, a beachhead. North Beach is a redoubt for Saxon Math, a traditional program. Both schools have permission to be different. The rest of the district's elementary schools use Everyday Math, a curriculum influenced by the constructivist or reform methods.
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A new teacher contract in the Memphis City Schools district includes a 2 percent raise this year, and a 1 percent raise next year for the largest union in the district.Related: Madison School District & Madison Teachers Union Reach Tentative Agreement: 3.93% Increase Year 1, 3.99% Year 2; Base Rate $33,242 Year 1, $33,575 Year 2: Requires 50% MTI 4K Members and will "Review the content and frequency of report cards".Although the raises are the smallest teachers have received in several decades, the deal was overwhelmingly approved by the membership.
"Nobody is going to turn down a 2 percent raise. Shelby County (teachers) got nothing," said Stephanie Fitzgerald, president of the Memphis Education Association.
MEA has more than 6,000 members, including principals and librarians.
The school board approved the agreement Monday night.
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Ed Inghrim, Director, Saucon Valley School Board Lower Saucon Township:
Recently New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie announced a freeze on spending and said pensions and benefits are the major driver of spending increases at all levels of government. He citied two examples of retired public employees. A 49-year-old retiree, who paid $124,000 toward retirement pension and health benefits, will get $3.3 million in pension payments and nearly $500,000 for health care benefits -- $3.8 million on a $120,000 investment. A retired teacher who paid $62,000 toward her pension and nothing for full family medical, dental and vision coverage, will collect $1.4 million in pension and $215,000 in health care benefit premiums over her lifetime.Saucon Valley School District 2009-2010 budget document (PDF).I decided to check his math using the Saucon Valley School District teacher contract as a model. I assumed a teacher hired at age 24 at $40,000 would work 30 years and get an average pay increase of 4 percent a year (quite conservative) and contribute 7.5 percent of salary to the state retirement system. Retiring at 54, the teacher's total pension contribution would be $168,255. Assuming the teacher lived to 85 and got health benefits until Medicare eligible, he or she would collect about $3.4 million after retiring. Not a bad return. If the annual raise were 5 percent, the teacher would get a return of $4.2 million on an investment of $199,317.
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Ninety percent of parents believe it is likely that their children will attend college, and most of them believe that any student can get the loans or financial aid required. But a new survey, reported on by my colleague, Tamar Lewin, finds that parents don't have a lot of confidence in the way colleges are managed.Increasingly, parents think colleges are too focused on their own finances, rather than the educational experience of students, the survey found.
"One of the really disturbing things about this, for those of us who work in higher education," said Patrick Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, "is the vote of no confidence we're getting from the public. They think college is important, but they're really losing trust in the management and leadership."
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For many of the 400 people who came out to defend their schools from Kansas City's chopping block Tuesday night, this was their first time for one of these hearings.Much more on Kansas City here.Not for those from McCoy Elementary.
They'd been through this before, most recently a year ago. And the school's supporters were back again in their orange shirts with their neighbors, teachers and a popular principal.
"It's the best school on the planet -- McCoy," 7-year-old Edwin Lopez declared to a round of cheers.
With the district pushing its longest list of possible closings ever, McCoy supporters know it will be hard for the school to escape one more time.
But as Superintendent John Covington and his staff started the community tour Tuesday night, he left everyone in the crowd with some hope that his plan to close half of the district's 60 schools could change. He also left them with the reality that many of their schools will be closed.
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The President and Secretary deserve credit for advancing the teacher quality agenda-a tough thing for democrats to do. Some of the credit for that goes to Jon Schnur and DFER. Because we don't have very good predictive techniques, it's important to watch teachers in their first few years, keep the best, and ask 10-20% or so that don't appear cut out for teaching to find a new job. Historically, 99% of teachers have been granted lifetime employment. The idiocy of this policy is finally coming to light. Two examples follow.NY Chancellor Joel Klein wrote a candid piece for the NY Daily Post which ran with the headline: Get Incompetent Teachers Off the Payroll:
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Daniel Mitchell at Cato says school choice "is better than government-imposed monopolies" and also that "[t]he evidence about the school-choice systems in Sweden, Chile, and the Netherlands is particularly impressive."I think the buyer needs to beware when he hears libertarian touting school choice concepts. Choice can add a lot of value to education, or it can be destructive. The details actually matter a great deal. Bentley MacLeod and Miguel Urquiola did a paper, "Anti-Lemons: School Reputation and Educational Quality" which sheds important light on this issue:
Friedman (1962) argued that a free market in which schools compete based upon their reputation would lead to an efficient supply of educational services. This paper explores this issue by building a tractable model in which rational individuals go to school and accumulate skill valued in a perfectly competitive labor market. To this it adds one ingredient: school reputation in the spirit of Holmstrom (1982). The first result is that if schools cannot select students based upon their ability, then a free market is indeed efficient and encourages entry by high productivity schools. However, if schools are allowed to select on ability, then competition leads to stratification by parental income, increased transmission of income inequality, and reduced student effort--in some cases lowering the accumulation of skill. The model accounts for several (sometimes puzzling) findings in the educational literature, and implies that national standardized testing can play a key role in enhancing learning.
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Dozens of public high schools in eight states will introduce a program next year allowing 10th graders who pass a battery of tests to get a diploma two years early and immediately enroll in community college.This makes sense.Students who pass but aspire to attend a selective college may continue with college preparatory courses in their junior and senior years, organizers of the new effort said. Students who fail the 10th grade tests, known as board exams, can try again at the end of their 11th and 12th grades. The tests would cover not only English and math but other subjects like science and history.
The new system of high school coursework with the accompanying board examinations is modeled largely on systems in high-performing nations including Denmark, Finland, England, France and Singapore.
The program is being organized by the National Center on Education and the Economy, and one of its goals is to reduce the numbers of high school graduates who need remedial courses when they enroll in college. More than a million college freshmen across America must take remedial courses each year, and many drop out before getting a degree.
"That's a central problem we're trying to address, the enormous failure rate of these kids when they go to the open admission colleges," said Marc S. Tucker, president of the center, a Washington-based nonprofit. "We've looked at schools all over the world, and if you walk into a high school in the countries that use these board exams, you'll see kids working hard, whether they want to be a carpenter or a brain surgeon."
Related: Janet Mertz's enduring effort: Credit for non-MMSD Courses
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A school superintendent in Rhode Island is trying to fix an abysmally bad school system.Jennifer Jordan & Linda Borg:Her plan calls for teachers at a local high school to work 25 minutes longer per day, each lunch with students once in a while, and help with tutoring. The teachers' union has refused to accept these apparently onerous demands.
The teachers at the high school make $70,000-$78,000, as compared to a median income in the town of $22,000. This exemplifies a nationwide trend in which public sector workers make far more than their private-sector counterparts (with better benefits).
After learning of the union's position, School Supt. Frances Gallo notified the state that she was switching to an alternative she was hoping to avoid: firing the entire staff at Central Falls High School. In total, about 100 teachers, administrators and assistants will lose their jobs.Gallo blamed the union's "callous disregard" for the situation, saying union leaders "knew full well what would happen" if they rejected the six conditions Gallo said were crucial to improving the school. The conditions are adding 25 minutes to the school day, providing tutoring on a rotating schedule before and after school, eating lunch with students once a week, submitting to more rigorous evaluations, attending weekly after-school planning sessions with other teachers and participating in two weeks of training in the summer.
The high school's 74 teachers will receive letters during school vacation advising them to attend a Feb. 22 meeting where each will be handed a termination notice that takes effect for the 2010-'11 school year, Gallo said.
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From Dennis to Eric:State Sen. James T. Meeks, D-Chicago, one of the most influential voices in the city's black community, recently stood before a group of mostly white, free-market conservatives to passionately plead for their support.
It was an unlikely meeting of the minds at an Illinois Policy Institute lunch session, but when Meeks was finished, he had his audience cheering. Might this be the launch of a political alliance that would unshackle Chicago kids from the tyranny, dangers and incompetence of Chicago Public Schools?Meeks, pastor of Salem Baptist Church, was pitching Senate Bill 2494, his proposed Illinois School Choice Program Act that would give vouchers to students in the worst public schools to attend non-public schools of their choice.
Meeks, a recent voucher convert, came to talk political reality: Legislation that would free children from their bondage would be hard for African-American lawmakers to oppose. Combined with the support of Republican voucher supporters, they might be able to create a coalition that could make vouchers available for the first time in Illinois.
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Daniel Willingham & Valerie Strauss:
My guest is cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham, professor at the University of Virginia and author of "Why Don't Students Like School?"By Daniel Willingham
I have recently written about the problems in trying to use student achievement data to measure teachers' effectiveness.But that doesn't mean that I think teachers' effectiveness should not be measured.
Indeed, I think it's essential that it is.
People focus on just one of the uses to which measurement of teachers could be put: rewarding the successful and firing the unsuccessful. But if you're interested in improving the practice of teaching, you must have a method of measuring teachers' effectiveness.
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The U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, held a conference call last week with about a thousand of his closest friends to talk about the Obama administration's initiatives on child nutrition and physical activity. He started by describing the twin problems that make this a high priority for the administration: obesity and hunger. A third of the nation's children are overweight, and 16.5 million children live in food-insecure households -- those with hunger or fear of starvation.For decades, the federal government has sought to address child hunger through programs such as the National School Lunch Program, School Breakfast Program, Snack Program, Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program, and Child and Adult Care Food Program. These programs are coming up for review as part of the reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act, which will occur this year, and attention will also be given to how they reduce obesity. Vilsack says the Obama administration is committing an additional $1 billion to this effort.
However, I was disappointed not to hear from Secretary Vilsack or see in the Obama budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2011 a clear commitment to fund Farm to School programs, which aim to get locally grown food served to children in school cafeterias. Among the groups working to do so are the National Farm to School Network and the Community Food Security Coalition.
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A nasal spray containing a hormone that makes women more maternal and men less shy apparently can help those with autism make eye contact and interact better with others, according to a provocative study released Monday.The study involving 13 adults with autism found that when they inhaled the hormone oxytocin they scored significantly better on a test that involved recognizing faces and performed much better in a game that involved tossing a ball with other people.
Although more research is needed to confirm and explore the findings, the results are the latest in a growing body of evidence indicating that the hormone could lead to ways to help people with the often devastating brain disorder function better.
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After five years of getting nowhere with Los Angeles Unified officials, fed-up parents in Sunland-Tujunga are using a new state law to force change at a long-troubled middle school.Parents and community members say problems at Mount Gleason Middle School, which has been on a federal list of under-performing campuses for a dozen years, go beyond failing test scores.
"There is an unsafe atmosphere at this school that is spilling over into the community...," said Lydia Grant, a resident and parent of a former Mount Gleason student. "People are tired of it and we want to see change."
Thanks to new legislation, known as the "parent trigger" law, they're able to do something about it.
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Rhode Island education officials are pushing an expansion of charter schools as a way to boost innovation and quality.Education Commissioner Deborah Gist said her goal is to have excellent schools for all children, whether it's a charter school or regular school.
Gist and other charter school supporters want to change a law that limits the number of state charter schools to 20 and says a maximum of 4 percent of the state's students can attend them. That's about 6,000 students.
Right now, Rhode Island has 13 charter schools with 3,200 students and 3,600 student on waiting lists.
Gist plans to testify in favor of removing the cap when lawmakers reconvene later this month.
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Here is an open letter which I sent last night to Edie Harding, Executive Director of the State Board of Education. Under the letter I have paraphrased her reply; below that is my response to her.I am responding to your comment today in the Seattle Times:
' "It's long been established that in our state, the local board is always the prime decision-maker on curriculum." ....the Seattle decision was "a surprise, and if I were the Seattle School Board, I would -- well, I might take issue with the judge," she added.'
Having been one of the plaintiffs in the recent textbook appeal in Seattle, I'm well aware that School Boards make curriculum decisions. However, Ms. Harding, what recourse do you suggest to parents when School Boards abdicate their decision making power - refusing to consider voluminous, compelling, evidence from parents and community members, and instead give school administrators carte blanch to turn math education in directions that are unacceptable to informed parents and community members?
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My colleagues at the Economix blog have put up an interesting post by an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst exploring the increasing competition for students who can help a school's bottom line.The professor, Nancy Folbre, notes that competition works when consumers "can taste before they buy," but that's difficult when making choices about higher education.
She particularly questions the marketing efforts of for-profit colleges.
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A Clayton State University education professor says the recipe has been in place for a while for CRCT cheating with the main ingredient being the pressure on schools to reach artificial and questionable goals.Here is an opinion piece by Mari Ann Roberts, assistant professor in Clayton State University's department of teacher education:
I like to cook so I'm going to share a recipe with you.And what do you get? Whatever it is, it can't be good.
- Take one flawed underfunded federal education improvement act, like NCLB,
- add increasing pressure on individual schools to meet "Adequate Yearly Progress,"
- include some inane expectations that teachers can work miracles,
- sprinkle liberally with furlough days, suspended raises, and budget cuts dating back to 2003 that will total more than $2.8 billion through the fiscal year ending next June.
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Superintendent John Covington has offered a painful but bold proposal to close about half the schools in the Kansas City School District. The radical surgery is needed for the district to survive and improve its chances of providing better public education.Covington and other officials announced on Saturday that up to 31 of the district's schools could close, including Westport High School and possibly Northeast High School. The central office at 12th and McGee streets also will be for sale.
The proposed reductions are fiscally sound and clearly necessary. The schools on average are operating at only half capacity. The months-long decision-making process evaluated each school's age, costs, efficiency and durability, as well as the best transfer possibilities for students to get a good education.
Covington and his administrative team deserve high marks so far for involving the public in the decision process, beginning last year. Parents, students, district workers, and business, faith, civic and community leaders were invited to "Right Sizing the District" forums.
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The Los Angeles Unified School District board was expected to vote Tuesday on whether to put a parcel tax on the June 8 ballot that would help ease its budget crisis.If approved by two-thirds of voters, the $100 per-parcel tax increase would generate $92.5 million per year for schools over four years, the Daily News reported Saturday.
Low-income seniors would be exempt from the property tax, and none of the money would fund administrators' salaries.
The income would go toward limiting class size increases, reducing teacher layoffs, and maintaining vocational and job training programs.
"The bottom line is the district is in desperate straits," said Judith Perez, president of Associated Administrators Los Angeles. "There is just no way to come up with this money through cuts."
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The third- and fourth-graders at Sharon Elementary know where the veggies in their soup come from because they've visited the farms. They know the nutritional value of the carrots, onions and cabbage because they've studied them in class, and they know how they're grown because they've nurtured them in raised beds out back.The 105-student school is part of the National Farm to School Network, aimed at getting healthier meals into school cafeterias, teaching kids about agriculture and nutrition and supporting local farmers.
About 40 states have farm-to-school programs, but Vermont is a leader in incorporating all three missions into its programs.
"Vermont has really taken it on in quite the most holistic way and not just in a couple of school districts, but statewide," said Anupama Joshi, director of the Farm to School program, based at the Center for Food and Justice at Occidental College in Los Angeles.
Vermont might be a step ahead of other states because a nonprofit partnership called Vermont FEED already had been working to get local foods into schools.
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As Default Rates on Borrowing for Higher Education Rise, Some Borrowers See No Way Out; 'This Is Just Outrageous Now'When Michelle Bisutti, a 41-year-old family practitioner in Columbus, Ohio, finished medical school in 2003, her student-loan debt amounted to roughly $250,000. Since then, it has ballooned to $555,000.
It is the result of her deferring loan payments while she completed her residency, default charges and relentlessly compounding interest rates. Among the charges: a single $53,870 fee for when her loan was turned over to a collection agency.
"Maybe half of it was my fault because I didn't look at the fine print," Dr. Bisutti says. "But this is just outrageous now."
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The pulpit at many black churches has become a place to pray to a higher power - and praise higher learning."The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of the dream of reaching the promised land- with education!" cried the man addressing the congregation Sunday at Greater St. John Missionary Baptist Church in West Oakland.
The words came not from the pastor, but from the president of California State University East Bay, Mo Qayoumi, whose remarks were also carried live on KDYA the Light, a gospel radio station.
On Sundays throughout February, Qayoumi and other university leaders are fanning out to more than 100 black churches across the state to spread the gospel of higher education in a program they call Super Sunday.
They're aiming their message mainly at the families of middle-school children, preaching the idea that it's never too early to prepare for college.
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First lady Michelle Obama's new campaign against childhood obesity, dubbed "Let's Move," puts improvements to school food at the top of the agenda. Some 31 million children participate in federal school meal programs, Obama noted in announcing her initiative last week, "and what we don't want is a situation where parents are taking all the right steps at home -- and then their kids undo all that work with salty, fatty food in the school cafeteria," she explained. "So let's move to get healthier food into our nation's schools."Last month I had a chance to see up close what all the school food fuss was about when I spent a week in the kitchen of my 10-year-old daughter's public school, H.D. Cooke Elementary, in Northwest D.C. Chartwells, the company contracted by the city to provide meals to the District's schools, had switched in the fall from serving warm-up meals prepackaged in a factory to food it called "fresh cooked," and I couldn't wait to chronicle in my food blog how my daughter's school meals were being prepared from scratch.
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Anthony J. Tata was an Army brigadier general in northeast Afghanistan's Kunar Province in April 2006 when a Taliban rocket slammed into a primary school in Asadabad, killing seven children and wounding 34.Brent Elementary principal Cheryl Wilhoyte was mentioned in this article. Wilhoyte is a former Superintendent of the Madison School District.The vicious attack and others like it by the Taliban left him with a thought: "It struck me at the time that if the enemy of my enemy is education, then perhaps that's a second act for me."
Three years later, Tata began his second act by accepting Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee's offer to become chief operating officer for D.C. public schools, a newly created post that places him in charge of purchasing, food service, technology and other support areas.
After a 28-year career that took him to Kosovo, Macedonia, Panama, the Philippines and the international agency charged with thwarting improvised explosive devices, Tata's mission is to help bring the District's notorious school bureaucracy to heel.
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TheDailyPage.com partnered with UW-Madison Prof. Sue Robinson's graduate journalism class during the fall semester to report on some of the challenges facing the Madison Metropolitan School District. The following are the resulting stories, focusing on the entire district as well as on each level; elementary, middle schools and high schools.
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The proposal by state Sen. Chris Buttars would chip away at Utah's $700-million shortfall. He's since offered a toned-down version: Just make senior year optional.A good idea.Reporting from Denver - At Utah's West Jordan High School, the halls have swirled lately with debate over the merits of 12th grade:
Is it a waste of time? Are students ready for the real world at 17?
For student body president J.D. Williams, 18, the answer to both questions is a resounding no. "I need this year," he said, adding that most of his classmates feel the same way.
The sudden buzz over the relative value of senior year stems from a recent proposal by state Sen. Chris Buttars that Utah make a dent in its budget gap by eliminating the 12th grade.
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Congratulations to Kansas City School District Superintendent John Covington.Related: Money And School Performance:He's just take the courageous and correct step of saying the district needs to shutter more than two dozen schools in the ever-shrinking district.
From 74,000 students about 40 years ago to 17,000 now, the district has no reason to continue to operate so many buildings at less than 50 percent capacity.
Covington, however, also must get rid of a proportionate number of administrators at the downtown office building, which has been bloated with staff for many years.
If more than 200 teachers are going to receive pink slips in closed buildings, the downtown administrators should share in the pain.
Read The Star story, which includes other aspects of Covington's proposal.
or decades critics of the public schools have been saying, "You can't solve educational problems by throwing money at them." The education establishment and its supporters have replied, "No one's ever tried." In Kansas City they did try. To improve the education of black students and encourage desegregation, a federal judge invited the Kansas City, Missouri, School District to come up with a cost-is-no-object educational plan and ordered local and state taxpayers to find the money to pay for it.Former Madison School District Superintendent Art Rainwater served in Kansas City prior to his time in Madison.Kansas City spent as much as $11,700 per pupil--more money per pupil, on a cost of living adjusted basis, than any other of the 280 largest districts in the country. The money bought higher teachers' salaries, 15 new schools, and such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a robotics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability, and field trips to Mexico and Senegal. The student-teacher ratio was 12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the country.
The results were dismal. Test scores did not rise; the black-white gap did not diminish; and there was less, not greater, integration.
The Kansas City experiment suggests that, indeed, educational problems can't be solved by throwing money at them, that the structural problems of our current educational system are far more important than a lack of material resources, and that the focus on desegregation diverted attention from the real problem, low achievement.
This is rather astonishing, given the amount of money spent in Kansas City.
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The emphasis on league tables does not encourage young people to learn to think for themselvesIt is nearly 35 years since James Callaghan gave his speech in 1976 at Ruskin College, Oxford, calling for a "great debate" on education to address the disappointing performance of far too many children. From the Ruskin speech flowed a greater involvement of government in state education and the founding of the national curriculum 10 years later.
The years after 1976 have seen school teaching change beyond recognition. The curriculum has become more uniform, inspection is much tighter and more prescriptive, and targets and league tables are the principal drivers of school improvement. Lazy teachers and ineffective schools have been tackled under this centralising imperative.
However, concerns are now heard that the new focus on league tables is narrowing the quality and breadth of education. Universities and employers often feel that schools are very effective in instructing their pupils in how to get top marks, but are less impressive at teaching them how to think.
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A report that Maryland students ranked first in the nation in the percentages of high school seniors taking and passing Advanced Placement exams comes just as Gov. Martin O'Malley is set to announce his legislative proposals for making the state more competitive for millions of dollars in new federal education funds. But it's too early for congratulations just yet. Maryland's high ranking on the AP exams masks glaring disparities between the state's best- and worst-performing school districts, and the legislative package the governor is proposing will need to be scrutinized closely on key elements, notably those involving charter schools, where the state still needs to demonstrate its commitment to education reform.It's a sign of definite progress that Governor O'Malley, who recently bristled at the notion that Maryland was ill-prepared to compete for federal school dollars under the nationwide Race to the Top program, has been working with teachers unions in recent weeks to get their agreement on legislation to reform the state's educational system.
The governor's package would extend the minimum time teachers are required to serve before being awarded tenure from two years to three, a change that would bring Maryland more in line with the rest of the nation; 38 states already require teachers to work at least three years before getting tenure, and eight states require more than that.
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Los Angeles schools Supt. Ramon C. Cortines proposed Friday cutting six days from the school year to help reduce an estimated $640-million deficit and avoid the need for widespread layoffs in the nation's second-largest school system.The move, announced by news release Friday evening, would save the district $90 million and could spare up to 5,000 jobs, Cortines said. The alternative to this drastic action, he said, would be to let the district go bankrupt.
"Do I think [this] is good education policy? No," he said. "But we are in a real crisis."
Cortines has repeatedly said that he did not want to shorten the school year. This is the first time in recent history that a Los Angeles school superintendent has made such a suggestion.
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Heather Vogell and Kristina Torres:
Superintendent Beverly Hall told a national audience of educators about Atlanta schools' steady strides forward at a conference in Phoenix Wednesday.But back home that same day, Georgia officials were unveiling findings that call into question how much of that progress was real.
Hall is at the high point of her career, basking in national accolades for a dramatic turnaround of the city's schools -- with rising state test scores cited as key evidence. Those scores are suddenly in doubt.
More than two-thirds of Atlanta's public elementary and middle schools face investigations into cheating after the state unveiled a statewide analysis of suspicious erasures on standardized tests. Atlanta had more schools flagged than any other district. In one school, nearly 90 percent of classrooms are under scrutiny.
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In China, learning spoken English is giving rise to a huge and growing market. For instance, in addition to English classes in public schools, parents send their children to about 50,000 for-profit training schools around the country, where English is the most popular subject. Instead of American Idol, on CCTV, the national government-owned TV network, they have the Star of Outlook English Talent Competition. This is possibly the largest nationwide competition in China. Last year, 400,000 students between the ages of 6 and 14 took part in it.This year, the competition is adding a virtual twist, and a startup based in Massachusetts called 8D World is at the center of it. 8D World runs a virtual world called Wiz World Online for Chinese-speaking kids who want to learn English. In what is a huge coup for the startup, this year's CCTV English competition will use Wiz World Online as its official training and competition platform. Wiz World will be used to screen contestants and will be promoted to millions of Chinese viewers.
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BBC:
Another small private school has been closed because of falling roll numbers its owners say are linked to the recession.Cliff School in Wakefield, ran by private school chain the Alpha Plus Group, is closing the school in July.
Pupil numbers are said to have fallen from 180 to 134 making its long term future unsustainable.
It is one of 21 small independent schools reported to have closed or been merged since January 2009.
Last week another small school in Sheffield, Brantwood School, said it would be closing unless additional funds could be found.
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Seventeen days ago, Jessica Deibel stood in front of the Milwaukee School Board, accepting praise for her accomplishments. Superintendent William Andrekopoulos gave her a plaque. Each board member shook her hand.Deibel and only seven other teachers in Milwaukee Public Schools were recognized for receiving in the past year national board certification, a prestigious credential for teachers.
Congratulations, Ms. Deibel. And now you're going to be bounced out of your job.
The school you love - where you send your own children - is taking it on the chin as the financial picture of MPS takes major steps into deeper financial distress. The staff will shrink at this little school where student achievement exceeds city averages by wide margins. Class size will go up sharply. Time with music, art and gym teachers will be reduced or eliminated.
Even with your new certification, the product of months of work, you have the least seniority in this small school and you will be the first one required to leave, Ms. Deibel.
"It was kind of like a slap in the face," Deibel said of the recognition at the School Board meeting. "Here's your reward, but you can't stay here."
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Kansas City Superintendent John Covington this afternoon unveiled his sweeping plan to close half of the district's schools, redistribute grade levels and sell the downtown central office.Related: Money And School Performance: Lessons from the Kansas City Desegregation Experiment:Covington presented his proposal to the school board in advance of a series of forums next week where the community will get to weigh in on what would be the largest swath of closures in district history, as well as a major reorganization.
"Folks, it's going to hurt," Covington told an overflow audience. "It's going to be painful, but if we work together, we're going to get through it."
Covington wants to be able to complete the public debate and present a final plan for a vote by the board at its Feb. 24 meeting.
The board and the community have a lot to digest over the next 10 days.
The proposal calls for:
•29 to 31 of the district's 60 schools would close, including Westport High and Central Middle.
For decades critics of the public schools have been saying, "You can't solve educational problems by throwing money at them." The education establishment and its supporters have replied, "No one's ever tried." In Kansas City they did try. To improve the education of black students and encourage desegregation, a federal judge invited the Kansas City, Missouri, School District to come up with a cost-is-no-object educational plan and ordered local and state taxpayers to find the money to pay for it.Former Madison School District Superintendent Art Rainwater served in Kansas City prior to his time in Madison.Kansas City spent as much as $11,700 per pupil--more money per pupil, on a cost of living adjusted basis, than any other of the 280 largest districts in the country. The money bought higher teachers' salaries, 15 new schools, and such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a robotics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability, and field trips to Mexico and Senegal. The student-teacher ratio was 12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the country.
The results were dismal. Test scores did not rise; the black-white gap did not diminish; and there was less, not greater, integration.
The Kansas City experiment suggests that, indeed, educational problems can't be solved by throwing money at them, that the structural problems of our current educational system are far more important than a lack of material resources, and that the focus on desegregation diverted attention from the real problem, low achievement.
This is rather astonishing, given the amount of money spent in Kansas City.
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What is the biggest issue facing the Milwaukee-area business community?It might surprise many to hear that several small business owners believe it is the area's education system, specifically the Milwaukee Public Schools.
"The state of education in the region is a huge issue for all of us," said Nancy Hernandez, owner of Abrazo Multicultural Marketing, Milwaukee. "We've faced issues for a number of years. We have to set aside the politics and deal with the issues. It is important to the future of our community."
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The superintendent of the Central Falls schools says she will fire every teacher at the high school after they refused to accept a reform plan.The plan was offered under a state mandate to fix the school, which has among Rhode Island's worst test scores and graduation rates.
The plan included six conditions such as adding 25 minutes to the day and providing tutoring outside school hours.
The added work didn't come with much extra pay and the teachers union refused to accept it.
Superintendent Frances Gallo blasted the union's "callous disregard" for the situation. She said the school's 74 teachers will be fired, effective next school year.
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Jamie Oliver:
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KHOU:
Houston Independent School District board members voted unanimously Thursday to extend the school year, and also approved applying tougher penalties for under-performing teachers.The policy will extend HISD's school year from 175 days to 190 days. The school year would be spread out more, beginning on August 23 and ending July 28. That means students will have a shorter summer and winter break.
Superintendent Terry Grier said the new plan will start this fall. As it stands right now, each school has the option to adopt the policy.
Nelly White, a parent, said she thinks it's a good idea.
"It's a good opportunity for the students, because they wouldn't forget what they learned over the summer," she said. "Sometimes when they come back to school they have to repeat everything they already learned."
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Senate Majority Leader Barbara Buono on Gov. Christie's plan to force school districts to use surpluses in lieu of state aid when that money would typically go back to residents in the form of property tax relief: "It's a solution to the budget crisis that falls disproportionately on the backs of middle-class homeowners, which is something I can't support."
Senate President Stephen M. Sweeney: "So much for a handshake. Governing by executive order and keeping plans secret until the last minute is not bipartisanship.''
Assembly Education Committee Chairman Patrick J. Diegnan, Jr. on Christie's plans to cut state aid to schools: "Democrats were able last year to increase school aid even as we slashed the state budget, so Gov. Christie's plan to cut resources for our schools and children is the wrong approach for our state. New Jerseyans have long had a shared commitment to the nearly 1.5 million children in our public schools, but Gov. Christie's approach steers us in a different direction."
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During the recent National School Boards Association conference in Washington, D.C., U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan talked about revising the "No Child Left Behind Act of 2001."Such reforms could change the school accountability measures that we have had in public education for nearly a decade. Under "No Child Left Behind," individual school progress is determined by student achievement on reading and math tests.
These tests are different in each state, based on state standards and linked to statewide curriculum. Tests are used to identify achievement gaps among groups and evaluate schools based on annual testing of all students who must show proficiency in reading and math by 2014.
"No Child Left Behind" legislation expired in 2007-08. Congress kept the measure going by approving annual appropriations for K-12 education. However, in 2010, the Obama administration is asking Congress for reauthorization, not of the "No Child Left Behind Act," but of the "Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965."
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The evolution of charter schools and education in Detroit is no more sharply illustrated than by these facts: It was Gov. Jennifer Granholm who went to Houston to convince the phenomenally successful YES academies to open a school in Detroit, and it was the Detroit Public Schools that sold YES the school building where it will begin holding classes this fall.Six years ago, Granholm stood in the schoolhouse door with the Detroit Federation of Teachers and said no to an expansion of charters in the city. Since then, the high performance of the city's best charter schools, the continued deterioration of the Detroit Public Schools and the demand from parents for alternative education choices has changed attitudes about charters. DPS, under the leadership of Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb, now welcomes the competition from charters as an impetus to improve its schools.
In fact, Bobb sold YES the old Winship Elementary School on the city's northwest side to use as a home for the new academy, serving grades 6-12.
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Sometime yesterday afternoon -- I wasn't watching the clock for reasons that will soon be apparent -- I heard a local TV news anchor announce that this was the "worst winter in Washington history." I was in bed at the time, taking one of the nice naps that have become part of my routine during the succession of storms that have kept me home since last Friday.My thought: Is "worst" really the right adjective?
I realize that we have had more snow than ever before. I know that many people are isolated in homes without heat or power, or are struggling to get to work, or are being tortured by whiny kids whose schools are closed. I sympathize with all of you. I feel your pain. I have been in your situation a few times in the past.
But can't we, just for a moment, recognize that for some of us life has never been so good?
The power has remained on at my house. My bosses have asked that I contribute an occasional piece via the Internet, but are far too distracted to demand more.
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Los Angeles schools Supt. Ramon C. Cortines earned more than $150,000 last year for serving on the board of one of the nation's leading educational publishing companies, a firm with more than $16 million in contracts with the school district over the last five years.Scholastic Inc. provides the main reading intervention curriculum for the Los Angeles Unified School District, a program that is part of the company's fast-growing educational technology business.
Cortines has disclosed his relationship with the New York-based company, and officials say he has avoided any decisions on Scholastic contracts.
Cortines' role, however, has generated criticism among some former senior officials and current employees. They said the corporate tie creates an appearance of impropriety.
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107K PDF. Much more on the citizen's successful lawsuit vs. the Seattle Public Schools here.
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Uniformed police delivered a school budget meeting flyer door-to-door in Monona on Feb. 11. The flyer encouraged public attendance at a school district hearing that night to discuss the possible consolidation of Monona's pre-kindergarten through second grade Maywood Elementary School with the community's third through sixth grade Winnequah Elementary. It was signed by Monona mayor, Robb Kahl.Fascinating and not a great idea.Depending on one's perspective, it was either a waste of taxpayer money and an embarrassing move by Kahl or a necessary means of getting important news to citizens who haven't gotten enough information on potential school budget cuts, especially when it comes to the possibility of closing the beloved Maywood school. Both points of view are represented in dozens of comments on Monona School Board Vice President Peter Sobol's blog.
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BOSTON - Writing Instruction in Massachusetts [1.3MB PDF], published today by Pioneer Institute, underscores the fact that despite 17 years of education reform and first-in-the-nation performance on standardized tests, many Massachusetts middle school students are still not on the trajectory to be prepared for writing in a work or post-secondary education environment.
The study is authored by Alison L. Fraser, president of Practical Policy, with a foreword by Will Fitzhugh of The Concord Review, who, since 1987, has published over 800 history research papers by high school students from around the world.
Writing Instruction finds that Massachusetts' students have improved, with 45 percent of eighth graders writing at or above the 'Proficient' level on the 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress test. In comparison, only 31 percent of eighth graders scored at or above 'Proficient' in 1998. The paper ascribes Massachusetts' success in improving writing skills to adherence to MCAS standards and the state's nation-leading state curriculum frameworks. It also suggests that strengthening the standards will help the state address the 55 percent of eighth graders who still score in the "needs improvement" or below categories.
According to a report on a 2004 survey of 120 major American businesses affiliated with the Business Roundtable, remedying writing deficiencies on the job costs corporations nearly $3.1 billion annually. Writing, according to the National Writing Commission's report Writing: A Ticket to Work...Or a Ticket Out, is a "threshold skill" in the modern world. Being able to write effectively and coherently is a pathway to both hiring and promotion in today's job market.
"While we should be pleased that trends show Massachusetts students have improved their writing skills, the data shows that we need renewed focus to complete the task of readying them for this important skill," says Jim Stergios, executive director of Pioneer Institute. "Before we even think about altering academic standards, whether through state or federal efforts, we need to recommit to such basics."
The study notes that if the failure to learn to write well is pervasive in Massachusetts, one should look first to the Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks and the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) designed to measure mastery of those frameworks. Analysis completed in December 2009 by a member of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education found that nearly all of the skills that the 21st Century Skills Task Force identified as important, such as effective written communication, are already embedded in the state's academic standards guiding principles.
Writing Instruction in Massachusetts has these additional findings:
===============
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog
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Center on Reinventing Public Education:
School districts can take steps to level out salary inequities caused by maldistributions of teachers, according to researchers at the University of Washington.It is a well-known fact that within districts, higher-paid teachers with more experience congregate in the more affluent schools, while poorer schools have less-experienced, lower-paid teachers.
If, as has been proposed, the federal Title I program closes a loophole in its "comparability" provision, districts would have no choice but to address the problem.
According to Marguerite Roza and Sarah Yatsko at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, districts have four "salary reallocation" options that can erase the imbalance and work to close the spending gap, without reassigning the more experienced teachers.
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Georgia education officials ordered investigations on Thursday at 191 schools across the state where they had found evidence of tampering on answer sheets for the state's standardized achievement test.The order came after an inquiry on cheating by the Governor's Office of Student Achievement raised red flags regarding one in five of Georgia's 1,857 public elementary and middle schools. A large proportion of the schools were in Atlanta.
The inquiry flagged any school that had an abnormal number of erasures on answer sheets where the answers were changed from wrong to right, suggesting deliberate interference by teachers, principals or other administrators.
Experts said it could become one of the largest cheating scandals in the era of widespread standardized testing.
"This is the biggest erasure problem I've ever seen," said Gregory J. Cizek, a testing expert at the University of North Carolina who has studied cheating. "This doesn't suggest that it was just kids randomly changing their answers, it suggests a pattern of unethical behavior on the part of either kids or educators."
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Center on Reinventing Public Education, via email:
An early "snapshot" analysis of 23 state budgets using federal education stimulus dollars indicates that short-term benefits could result in less spending on schools over the long term in some states.In their analysis, Have States Disproportionately Cut Education Budgets During ARRA? Early Findings, researchers Marguerite Roza and Susan Funk raise a yellow flag of caution.
In the case of 13 of the 23 states they examined, education spending as a share of state budgets declined during the infusion of the federal stimulus money via the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).
"A key concern emerging in this analysis is the notion that while the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund (SFSF) was intended to 'protect' state education spending (and did likely result in short-term stabilization), the longterm effect could be the opposite," according to the brief. "For states where education's share of the state budget shrank during SFSF, we might anticipate that restoring education's previous share could be difficult."
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Nicole Santa Cruz:
Marshall High School beat out 63 schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District in the annual Academic Decathlon, district officials announced Thursday night.Anastasya Lloyd-Damnjanovic was the highest-scoring individual student, with 8,933 points.
The decathlon tests students' knowledge in a variety of areas, including history. This year's focus was the French Revolution.
Marshall first won a national championship in 1987. Since then, the district has won 15 state and 10 national competitions.
West High School in Torrance won the Los Angeles County Academic Decathlon for the second year in a row, county officials announced Thursday.
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Nicole Stockdale:
Sunday, yet another long-form essay on the Texas State Board of Education will hit the newsstands, this one in The New York Times Magazine."How Christian Were the Founders?" discusses the philosophy of "members of what is the most influential state board of education in the country, and one of the most politically conservative," focusing the debate on whether the authors of the Constitution intended the U.S. to be a Christian nation.
The one thing that underlies the entire program of the nation's Christian conservative activists is, naturally, religion. But it isn't merely the case that their Christian orientation shapes their opinions on gay marriage, abortion and government spending. More elementally, they hold that the United States was founded by devout Christians and according to biblical precepts. This belief provides what they consider not only a theological but also, ultimately, a judicial grounding to their positions on social questions. When they proclaim that the United States is a "Christian nation," they are not referring to the percentage of the population that ticks a certain box in a survey or census but to the country's roots and the intent of the founders.
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Marshall High School beat out 63 schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District in the annual Academic Decathlon, district officials announced Thursday night.Anastasya Lloyd-Damnjanovic was the highest-scoring individual student, with 8,933 points.
The decathlon tests students' knowledge in a variety of areas, including history. This year's focus was the French Revolution.
Marshall first won a national championship in 1987. Since then, the district has won 15 state and 10 national competitions.
West High School in Torrance won the Los Angeles County Academic Decathlon for the second year in a row, county officials announced Thursday.
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Milwaukee Public Schools has failed to fulfill multiple elements of its state-ordered educational improvement plan, according to newly released documents from the state Department of Public Instruction that detail why the district is at risk of losing millions of dollars of federal funding.Though the main standoff between the state and its largest district continues to be a disagreement over how MPS imposes remedies of an ongoing special education lawsuit, the new documents specify where MPS hasn't met other state orders, including literacy instruction, identifying students who need extra help or special services, and tracking newly hired, first-year teachers and teachers hired on emergency licenses.
The district's lack of compliance with what are known formally as "corrective action requirements" - imposed by the state because MPS repeatedly has missed yearly academic progress targets - is what led Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers last week to initiate the process of withholding up to $175 million in federal dollars.
Legally, the greatest leverage Evers can exert against a poorly performing district under the federal No Child Left Behind law is to withhold federal dollars. To take that action, he said, he first had to issue notice to MPS and allow the district to request a hearing.
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When I interviewed Mayor Tom Barrett about his proposal to take over MPS last August, he insisted it was no power grab.It was all about the kids, Mayor Barrett said. He believed the change was the right thing. He acknowledged that the plan was controversial but the legislative session in Madison would be over by the end of the year and, one way or another, we'd all move on by 2010.
Well here it is February, and we're still talking about it. The Democratic leaders in the state legislature show no interest in bringing the plan to a vote, and there's little evidence the bill would pass.In an apparent change of heart, Mayor Barrett continues to push the idea. With his experience in Madison and Washington, you'd expect Barrett to know how to count and to know when to stop pushing for a piece of legislation that doesn't have enough votes.
But Barrett is also running for statewide office, and he appears to believe this issue will play well with voters across Wisconsin. It gives him the opportunity to run against type and show that he's willing to take on the teachers union, usually a reliable supporter of Democrats, in support of a popular initiative.
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At tonight's listening session several people talked about the structural deficit problem: the fact that due to the state funding formula, we are looking at a deficit that grows by a million dollars each year for as far as the projections go. As Craig mentioned, our revenues increase by about 2% a year (less than inflation) while our expenses go up by more than 4% per year. This is the real problem that makes the issues brought up today look like child's play. Several people asked us to consider the long term, a sentiment I couldn't agree with more. Others asked us to consider an operating referendum to avoid cuts. I agree that given the current situation we will need to consider this as we move forward. But an operating referendum alone can't solve this problem - the deficit is not a one time or short term issue.A while ago someone asked for my long term plan for solving the structural deficit. I've given this a lot of thought, and I have to say there is no magic bullet for this, I haven't heard anyone on the board or administration articulate any specific ideas that get us out of this situation. What we need more than anything is else is good ideas.
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Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee, trying to salvage something from a lost week, has asked teachers to report to school Friday for a scheduled day of professional development. Rhee increased funding and time devoted to helping educators lift their game. So, ice and drifting snow not withstanding, PD is on. Here is her just-released letter to teachers:Dear DCPS Teachers,
We have decided to proceed with Friday's professional development day as planned. One of the key messages I hear from teachers at the listening sessions I do at schools across the city is that we need to do more to support you in our work. The district-wide professional development days are a key opportunity to do exactly that. Because we have such a limited number of these days, and because the worst of the weather has passed, I have decided to move forward with the scheduled activities tomorrow.
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Ryan Mac, via a kind reader's email:
n January, on the first day of the Computer Science 106A: Program Methodology course at Stanford University, Eric Roberts, the professor, began with his customary admonition: Cheat, and you will be caught. And, he added: Cheat, and your classmates will suffer. More weight will be given to the final exam when calculating the final grade.These are not idle threats in a department where it may be easy to cheat (cut, paste some code, voila!) but it is just as easy to detect cheating. (It is the computer science department, after all). Jay de la Torre, a senior, was caught and has been suspended this quarter as part of his punishment. Mr. de la Torre was taking the computer science class for a second time in his junior year when he cheated. After he was disciplined, he resigned from his position as student body vice president in November, The Stanford Daily reported.
"I wasn't even thinking of how it easy it would for me to be caught," he said.
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Consolidating public school districts in Kansas could save millions of taxpayer dollars, although not enough to solve the state's budget crisis this year, according to a new report released Monday.Kansas has 293 school districts and last forced consolidation in the 1960s when the state overhauled education governance. Since then, legislators have relied on districts to decide for themselves when it's time to merge, offering a few financial incentives to ease the process.
In its report, the Legislative Division of Post Audit (2.6MB PDF, supplemental District level data) looked at methods that would reduce the number of districts to either 266 or 152.
The first scenario - in which the state would have 50 fewer public school buildings and 230 fewer teachers and administrators - would save $18 million. Auditors said the consolidation could happen among districts that already split grade levels, such as one that has the elementary school and the other the high school.
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I have been teaching literature for 30 years, and the longer I teach, the more I enjoy teaching Shakespeare. As I grow older and wearier, his plays seem to deliver greater matter and art in a more condensed and lively way than any other text I could choose. To be clichéd about it: Shakespeare offers more bang for the buck.While Shakespeare now draws me more than ever before, one work in particular draws me most. This is The Merchant of Venice. For me, this extraordinary play grows increasingly subtle and supple with time. It continues to excite me with its language, its depth of character, and its philosophical, political, spiritual, and pedagogical implications. Looking back over my years of teaching the play, I see that the way it has been received by my students is an index to how our society has changed. I also see how much the play continues to push against established readings and to challenge even the most seemingly enlightened perspectives. The Merchant of Venice is both a mirror of our times and a means of transcending the bias of our times. It teaches how to teach.
My response to the play may be connected to the nature of my career in literature. I was exposed to highbrow literary criticism in the 1970s at elite undergraduate and graduate institutions. This was a time when multiculturalism was making inroads in academia but when progressive thinking coexisted with an ingrained snobbism regarding how literature should be taught and who should teach it.
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On an April morning last year, more than 200 juniors took their seats at Marshall High School for the Prairie State Achievement Examination, a measure of whether their school had prepared them to meet basic state learning standards.When the results came in for Marshall, only three students had met the standards for the math part of the test. Eighteen had passed the reading part. No students had exceeded state standards in reading or math.
The test results were but one indication of a high school in trouble. For years, many Marshall students have been ill prepared to enter college or the job market, and the school's long history is also marked by frustration and failures that often have little to do with math or reading.
The dismal statistics have made Marshall a target for turnaround in the next school year, along with Phillips High School and three elementary schools. Turnaround is an intervention promoted by the Obama administration that involves firing a school's current staff, committing resources in the form of building upgrades and new curriculums, and training new teachers.
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The Great Recession may be over, but this era of high joblessness is probably just beginning. Before it ends, it will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults. It will leave an indelible imprint on many blue-collar men. It could cripple marriage as an institution in many communities. It may already be plunging many inner cities into a despair not seen for decades. Ultimately, it is likely to warp our politics, our culture, and the character of our society for years to come.HOW SHOULD WE characterize the economic period we have now entered? After nearly two brutal years, the Great Recession appears to be over, at least technically. Yet a return to normalcy seems far off. By some measures, each recession since the 1980s has retreated more slowly than the one before it. In one sense, we never fully recovered from the last one, in 2001: the share of the civilian population with a job never returned to its previous peak before this downturn began, and incomes were stagnant throughout the decade. Still, the weakness that lingered through much of the 2000s shouldn't be confused with the trauma of the past two years, a trauma that will remain heavy for quite some time.
The unemployment rate hit 10 percent in October, and there are good reasons to believe that by 2011, 2012, even 2014, it will have declined only a little. Late last year, the average duration of unemployment surpassed six months, the first time that has happened since 1948, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking that number. As of this writing, for every open job in the U.S., six people are actively looking for work.
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1) Last year's federal stimulus bill included $100 billion for education to mitigate the effects of the recession. This money was intended to last for two years but some states used up all the money this year. The New York Times reports that even though Ed Sec Arne Duncan "repeatedly warned states and districts to avoid spending the money in ways that could lead to dislocations when the gush of federal money came to an end," some states disregarded that advice. New Jersey is part of that club. The Times piece quotes our very own Dr. Bruce Baker of Rutgers who predicts that "States are going to face a huge problem because they'll have to find some way to replace these billions, either with cuts to their K-12 systems or by finding alternative revenues." Bottom line: we spent more this year because we imprudently allocated federal funds and spent it all in one shot.2) Teachers' annual salary increases continued at an unabated 4.5% or so. Some districts reported slightly lower settlements - about a 4.3% range - but not enough to make a difference. Health benefits packages also saw big hikes and 86% of school employees in Jersey make no contributions.
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-- Feb. 10, 2010: Inskip Elementary School Principal Elisa Luna and Assistant Principal Amy Brace were shot in the school office area. The suspect, who police said "is or was an employee of the school" minutes later.-- Oct. 8, 2008: A 15-year-old Harriman High School student brought a gun to school as part of what he described as a murder-suicide plan, authorities said. The boy, a sophomore, gave up the gun when confronted
-- Oct. 7, 2008: 16-year-old student at Austin-East Performing Arts and Sciences Magnet High School in East Knoxville was arrested after authorities, acting on a tip, found a 9 mm pistol and ammunition in the boy's backpack.
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Unlike other undergrads on the UW-Madison campus, many of these students weren't interested in taking AP chemistry or honors English in high school.They may not have taken the ACT college entrance exam or cared much about grades. Their kingdom is the farm, not the classroom.
"I've never liked school that much," said Brittney Muenster, 18, of Seymour, about 20 miles west of Green Bay. "I just never saw fit to go to school for four years."
One of the university's oldest programs, UW-Madison's Farm and Industry Short Course has been offering Wisconsin's future farmers like Muenster cutting-edge techniques during the non-growing season, November to March.
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Gayle Worland, via a kind reader's email:
The Madison School District is facing a $30 million budget hole for 2010-11, a dilemma that could force school board members this spring to order massive cuts in programs, dramatically raise property taxes, or impose a combination of both.I'm not sure where the $360 million number came from. Board member Ed Hughes mentioned a $432,764,707 2010-2011 budget number. The 2009-2010 budget, according to a an October, 2009 District document was $418,415,780. The last "Citizen's budget" number was $339,685,844 in 2007-2008 and $333,101,865 in 2006-2007.District officials will unveil a list of possible cuts -- which could include layoffs -- next month, with public hearings to follow.
"This is a big number," School Board President Arlene Silveira said. "So we have to look at how we do business, we have to look at efficiencies, we have to look at our overall budget, and we are going to have to make hard decisions. We are in a horrible situation right now, and we do have to look at all options."
Even with the maximum hike in school property taxes -- $28.6 million, or a jump of $312.50 for the owner of a $250,000 Madison home -- the district would have to close a $1.2 million budget gap, thanks in part to a 15 percent drop in state aid it had to swallow in 2009-10 and expects again for 2010-11.
The district, with a current budget of about $360 million, expects to receive $43.7 million from the state for 2010-11, which would be the lowest sum in 13 years, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau, and down from a high of $60.7 million in 2008-09. The district is receiving $51.5 million from the state for the current school year.
The budget numbers remind me of current Madison School Board member Ed Hughes' very useful 2005 quote:
This points up one of the frustrating aspects of trying to follow school issues in Madison: the recurring feeling that a quoted speaker - and it can be someone from the administration, or MTI, or the occasional school board member - believes that the audience for an assertion is composed entirely of idiots.Related: Madison School District & Madison Teachers Union Reach Tentative Agreement: 3.93% Increase Year 1, 3.99% Year 2; Base Rate $33,242 Year 1, $33,575 Year 2: Requires 50% MTI 4K Members and will "Review the content and frequency of report cards" and "Budget comments in a vacuum?"
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The College Board [1MB PDF file]:
Educators across the United States continue to enable a wider and more ethnically diverse proportion of students to achieve success in AP®. Significant inequities remain, however, which can result in traditionally underserved students not receiving the type of AP opportunities that can best prepare them for college success. The 6th Annual AP Report to the Nation uses a combination of state, national and AP Program data to provide each U.S. state with the context it can use to celebrate its successes, understand its unique challenges, and set meaningful and data-driven goals to prepare more students for success in college.
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Houston-area school districts spend tens of millions of dollars a year on teachers with advanced degrees that studies show don't produce better student achievement.Background via this spreadsheet.But with money tight, a handful of districts are considering ditching the traditional salary bump for teachers with master's degrees in favor of pay based more on student learning. The Houston Independent School District and the top-rated YES Prep charter school chain are among those looking to experiment.
"I would like us to look with our teachers and see whether or not those dollars could be spent in a more productive way," HISD Superintendent Terry Grier said.
HISD estimates that the extra payout for teachers with a master's or a doctorate is costing taxpayers about $7.8 million this school year. Grier suggested that the money might be better spent to pay teachers more for taking on leadership roles or to bolster the district's bonus plan tied to student test scores.
Texas lawmakers stopped mandating higher salaries for teachers with advanced degrees in 1984, but many districts continue the practice. The number of teachers with master's degrees statewide has grown over the last four years, though the percentage has dropped slightly to 20.9.
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New Jersey Department of Education 140K PDF. Related: Madison School District 2010-2011 budget calendar.
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Keeping traditional school libraries up to date is costly, with the constant need to acquire new books and to find space to store them. Yet for all that trouble, students roam the stacks less and less because they find it so much more efficient to work online. One school, Cushing Academy, made news last fall when it announced that it would give away most of its 20,000 books and transform its library into a digital center.Do schools need to maintain traditional libraries? What are the educational consequences of having students read less on the printed page and more on the Web?
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New Jersey Department of Education:
The federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act has imposed specific accountability and reporting requirements on states. The NCLB reports present school-, district-, and state-level information in those areas mandated by NCLB, which are as follows: status regarding Adequate Yearly Progress; information on highly qualified teachers; attendance and dropout data; and assessment data that has incorporated all of the conditions mandated under NCLB for meeting federally approved proficiency levels.The results displayed on NCLB Reports are based on the state assessment data with the NCLB conditions applied. Additionally, the NCLB data incorporates the data appeals submitted by districts/schools that have been granted by the NJDOE. Therefore, the data in the NCLB Reports may be different from the data displayed on the NJ School Report Cards.
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Before being ordered by Gov. Rick Perry not to compete for a chunk of the $4.3 billion "Race to the Top" federal grants for public schools, staffers at the Texas Education Agency had put in more than 800 hours preparing an application.
Inquiring minds, including my colleague Ericka Mellon, wanted to look at what our employees had proposed and filed requests for copies of the draft under the Texas Public Information Act.But TEA Commissioner Robert Scott, a Perry loyalist, ordered agency attorneys to appeal to the attorney general, asking that the work be declared a state secret.
The Public Information Act states that all documents produced with the taxpayers' money are public with certain specific exceptions
So what exception is the TEA citing?
The exception that information can be kept from the public if its release "would give advantage to a competitor or bidder."
But we're not bidding or competing.
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WSFA:
Why shouldn't local school boards have the option of allowing charter schools in their districts if they feel it can help serve students better?A group of legislators in the House Education Appropriations Committee not only rejected that option, but didn't allow other members of the House to even vote on it.
They rejected the charter schools possibility outright. With it they also rejected the possibility of millions of dollars in federal assistance for education.
For a state that can use every cent and more to improve education, this wasn't a wise choice.
The $ 4 billion dollars in federal money will be spent, but the likelihood of part of it being spent for our students is now diminished, since part of the criteria for getting the money is charter schools being an option in your state.
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Spurred by a succession of reports pointing to the importance of algebra as a gateway to college, educators and policymakers embraced "algebra for all" policies in the 1990s and began working to ensure that students take the subject by 9th grade or earlier.Related: Madison School District Math Task Force and West High School Math Teachers letter to Isthmus.
A trickle of studies suggests that in practice, though, getting all students past the algebra hump has proved difficult and has failed, some of the time, to yield the kinds of payoffs educators seek.
Among the newer findings:• An analysis using longitudinal statewide data on students in Arkansas and Texas found that, for the lowest-scoring 8th graders, even making it one course past Algebra 2 might not be enough to help them become "college and career ready" by the end of high school.
• An evaluation of the Chicago public schools' efforts to boost algebra coursetaking found that, although more students completed the course by 9th grade as a result of the policy, failure rates increased, grades dropped slightly, test scores did not improve, and students were no more likely to attend college when they left the system.
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via a TJ Mertz email [PDF Flyer]:
What: Public Forum featuring all candidates for Madison Board of Education.
When: Sunday February 21, 2010; 1:30 to 3:30 PM.
Where: JC Wright Middle School, 1717 Fish Hatchery Rd. Madison, WI.
Contact: Thomas J. Mertz, tjmertz@sbcglobal.net; (608) 255-4550On Sunday, February 21, voters in the Madison Metropolitan School District will have their first opportunity to hear and question the School Board candidates on the ballot in the April 6 election. Unopposed incumbents Beth Moss and Maya Cole will begin with short statements on their service and why they are seeking re-election. Next the candidates for Seat 4, James Howard and Tom Farley, will answer questions from Progressive Dane and the audience. Madison District 12 Alder and member of the Board of Education
- Common Council Liaison Committee Satya Rhodes-Conway will serve as the moderator.
Progressive Dane is hosting this event as a public service to increase awareness of this important election."The seven people on the School Board are responsible for the education of about 24,000 students and an annual budget of roughly $400 million." explained Progressive Dane Co-Chair and Education Task Force Chair Thomas J. Mertz. "We want people to know what is going on, choose their candidate wisely and get
involved.Candidates Tom Farley and James Howard welcome this opportunity to communicate with the voters. Farley expects a substantive discussion; he is "looking forward to participating in the Progressive Dane forum. It will certainly be our most in-depth public discussion of the issues - and most likely the liveliest and most enjoyable one too."
Howard expressed his appreciation for "this opportunity to talk to the voters about my record of service with public schools and my unique perspective that I will add to the Board of Education" and is also ready to discuss "how to maintain and strengthen Madison schools."
Incumbents Cole and Moss are also pleased to take part. Cole said she is "happy to have this opportunity to meet with members of our community to discuss the work of the Board, to listen to their concerns and to share the opportunities we are embracing to make our district better for all children. Moss also appreciates the chance to share her thoughts on "the good work that is going on in the schools and some of the challenges we face."
Progressive Dane is a progressive political party in Dane County, Wisconsin. Progressive Dane is working to make Dane County a better place for everyone (no exceptions!). Progressive Dane helps community members organize around issues that are important to them and also works on the grassroots level to elect progressive political candidates.
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Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:
t almost didn't happen.And Madison should be grateful that it did.
Two enthusiastic candidates are seeking an empty seat on the Madison School Board this spring.
James Howard, an economist and father of city school children, lists "high expectations" as a top priority.
Tom Farley, director of a nonprofit foundation and father of Madison school children, touts President Barack Obama's call for innovation.
It's the only competitive race for three seats because incumbents Maya Cole and Beth Moss are unopposed.
That leaves Howard's and Farley's campaigns to shine a needed spotlight on the many challenges and opportunities facing city schools.
Both men hope to replace Johnny Winston Jr., who announced last year he would not seek a third term.
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Jonathan Reider via Valeria Strauss:
I have long wondered why the National Merit scholarship program had so much cache, given the criteria necessary for winning.
The program is a competition in which kids become eligible if they do well on the PSAT, or Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test, which is generally taken in 11th grade though some students take it earlier. Any regular reader to this blog will know that I do not look kindly on anything in education that relies on the a single standardized test score.
Here is a critique of the program that I recently read and wanted to share. It was written by Jonathan Reider, director of college counseling at San Francisco University High School, in response to a list-serv query about how schools should display National Merit winners. His advice: Don't.
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Susan Troller, via a Chris Murphy email:
When teachers Bryan Grau and Debora Gil R. Casado pitched an idea in 2002 to start a charter school in Madison that would teach classes in both English and Spanish, they ran into resistance from school administrators and their own union. Grau and his cohorts were asked to come up with a detailed budget for their proposal, but he says they got little help with that complex task. He recalls one meeting in particular with Roger Price, the district's director of financial services.Related: the now dead proposed Madison Studio Charter and Badger Rock Middle School."We asked for general help. He said he would provide answers to our specific questions. We asked where to begin and again he said he would answer our specific questions. That's the way it went."
Ruth Robarts, who was on the Madison School Board at the time, confirms that there was strong resistance from officials under the former administration to the creation of Nuestro Mundo, which finally got the green light and is now a successful program that is being replicated in schools around the district.
"First they would explain how the existing programs offered through the district were already doing a better job than this proposal, and then they would show how the proposal could never work," says Robarts. "There seemed to be a defensiveness towards these innovative ideas, as if they meant the district programs were somehow lacking."
The Madison School District "has historically been one of the most hostile environments in the state for charter schools, especially under Superintendent Rainwater," adds John Gee, executive director of the Wisconsin Association of Charter Schools.
Madison continues to lag other Districts in terms of innovative opportunities, such as Verona's new Chinese Mandarin immersion charter school.
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MassINC, C. Anthony Broh & Dana Ansel:
Rising college costs have Americans making greater sacrifices to get their degrees. In 2008, families took on more than $86 billion in college loans and the average undergraduate finished school with more than $23,000 in debt. Higher education is now one of the most important investment decisions middle class Americans make. But far too often they're lured to colleges with the most energetic tour guide, the biggest reputation for partying, or the highest ranking in the popular press.Read the complete report here. CTRL - click to download the 2.0MB PDF file.These temptations win out because the choices are complicated and families aren't getting the information they needed to make truly informed decisions. Beyond choosing a school, families trying to find the best savings plan or the least expensive loan also face complicated choices with insufficient information.
According to the new MassINC report, "When you look at the tuition prices that middle class families are facing, together with the debt burdens graduates are taking on, it is astounding that there is such little transparency in the higher education marketplace," said Greg Torres, President of MassINC and Publisher of CommonWealth magazine. "By laying out a framework for how parents and students navigate this system, we hope to shed some light on what we can do to give more support to families making one of the biggest investments of their lives."
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Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau:
Virtual charter schools are publicly funded nonsectarian schools that are exempt from many regulations that apply to traditional public schools and that offer the majority of their classes online. They began operating in Wisconsin during the 2002-03 school year. Pupils typically attend from their homes and communicate with teachers using e-mail, by telephone, or in online discussions. During the 2007-08 school year, 15 virtual charter schools enrolled 2,951 pupils. Most were high schools.A Wisconsin Court of Appeals ruling in December 2007 prevented the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) from providing state aid payments to a virtual charter school through the open enrollment program, which allows pupils to attend public schools outside of their school districts of residence. 2007 Wisconsin Act 222, which was enacted to address concerns raised in the lawsuit, also required us to address a number of topics related to virtual charter schools. Therefore, we evaluated:
- enrollment trends, including the potential effects of a limit on open enrollment in virtual charter schools that was enacted in 2007 Wisconsin Act 222;
- virtual charter school operations, including attendance requirements, opportunities for social development and interaction, and the provision of special education and related services;
- funding and expenditures, including the fiscal effects of open enrollment on "sending" and "receiving" districts;
- teaching in virtual charter schools, including teacher licensing and pupil-teacher interaction; and
- academic achievement, including test scores and other measures, as well as pupils', parents', and teachers' satisfaction with virtual charter schools.
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IT WAS never reasonable to expect that Barack Obama's budget proposal, delivered to Congress on February 1st, would do much to bring down America's vast deficit in the near term. True, the economy has returned to growth. But a big part of that consists of restocking after a savage downturn that has left inventories depleted. Consumers are still struggling with the collapse in the values of their homes and other assets. And unemployment stands at a stubborn 10%: the administration forecasts see only a fractional fall in joblessness this year.
Unlike other rich countries, America lacks the "automatic stabilisers" that kick in during times of recession to help boost demand. Unemployment benefit is extremely limited. Most states are legally barred from running deficits, so when their revenues fall in times of recession they make painful cuts, firing workers and ending programmes--thus exacerbating the downturn rather than offsetting it. Only the federal government can fill the demand gap, and if it is too parsimonious and the recession returns, the deficit would get much worse.
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The seminal coming-of-age novel, The Catcher in the Rye, came out in 1951 during a time of anxious, Cold War conformity. The book by J D Salinger, the reclusive American author who died last week at the age of 91, featured its immortal teenage protagonist - the anguished, rebellious Holden Caulfield.The book struck a chord with American teenagers who identified with the novel's themes of alienation, innocence and rebellion.
But when the novel was translated into Russian during the "Khrushchev thaw", its anti-hero's tormented soul-searching also reverberated among admirers throughout the Soviet bloc.
Nad propastyu vo rzhi was first published in the Soviet Union in the November 1960 issue of the popular literary magazine Inostrannaya Literatura (Overseas Literature). The translation became an instant sensation, and dog-eared copies of the magazine were passed from reader to reader.
Boris Paramonov, a Russian philosopher and contributor to RFE/RL's Russian Service, says he and his Russian friends and colleagues instantly recognized that it was a book that would endure.
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Ask about the signature achievements of George W. Bush's eight years as president, and the No Child Left Behind Act is certain to be high on the list. The 2002 law made accountability a watchword in public school education. It aimed to evaluate the nation's elementary and secondary schools based on student test scores and to hold schools, teachers and administrators to account for their success or failure in moving students to achieve proficiency targets for the classroom.The law, which has been the subject of much debate and criticism from the start, is up for reauthorization this year. President Obama has made clear his intent to reshape the legislation and the federal role in public education. Not clear yet is what precisely he intends to do.
No Child Left Behind has been criticized fiercely for its heavy emphasis on yearly testing and the rating of schools as successes or failures on the basis of test scores. For teachers and school officials, one of the most contentious of the law's requirements is that schools be able to show, from the test scores, that every student group is making adequate yearly progress, AYP. Repeated failure to make AYP results in penalties that include shutting down schools.
The law also set a deadline: that students be proficient in math and English by 2014, a goal Obama's secretary of education, Arne Duncan, recently described as utopian.
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The mother who threw her four-year-old daughter from a shopping mall balcony before leaping to her death had recently learned that her child had failed to get a primary place at an ESF school, despite attending an ESF kindergarten. Police are still investigating the cause of the tragedy....
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Wisconsin Representative Annette Polly Williams:
February 5, 2010Clusty Search: Polly Williams, Tony Evers. Via the Milwaukee Drum.State Superintendent Tony Evers
Department of Public Instruction
125 S. Webster Street
PO Box 7841
Madison, WI 53707-7841Dear Superintendent Evers:
I am contacting you regarding your Notice of Decision dated February 4, 2010 issued to the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) which would potentially eliminate the $175 million in federal funds received for services to low-income children through the Title I program. In your press statement, you indicated that you had a legal responsibility to the children of Milwaukee and that you were using the only tool allowed under state law to ensure these federal funds are used effectively to improve MPS. Not only I am deeply perplexed by the timing of this notice, but I'm equally concemed over the use of your authority to withhold federal dollars to "speed up change" in MPS. I find your efforts to be disingenuous.
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President Obama's Race to the Top (RttT) state competition has brought charter schools to the forefront of public education reform. Additionally, charter schools are prominent in Obama's 2011 proposed budget - increasing funding for charter schools and an extra $1.8 billion toward Supporting Student Success (which focuses on Promise Neighborhoods, of which charter schools are the central focus).RttT relies heavily on charter schools as a tool for reform, awarding more points to states which enable charter school creation than to those which do not:
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It's easy to miss the school tucked into the corner of a strip mall at N. 25th St. and W. North Ave. and its sister building a few miles away, an airy gray metal and brick structure that doesn't have a sign yet.The most noticeable school of the three may be at the south end of a nonprofit building on N. King Drive, and that's because a large banner outside proclaims the high school's name.
But within these unassuming spaces, HOPE Christian Schools are quietly expanding and changing, figuring out the best way to make sure every child - from kindergarten through 12th grade - is on the path to college.
The schools are without frills because energy and resources at this point are better spent on the elements more closely tied to student success: strong teachers who want to stay year to year, innovative and empowered administrators, testing tools that provide day-to-day and week-to-week feedback about how fast kids are progressing and which ones need more attention.
"We're still focusing on what our model looks like," said Andrew Neumann, president of HOPE Christian Schools.
Neumann also is president of the umbrella nonprofit Educational Enterprises, which plans to establish schools nationwide that help populations of disadvantaged, minority children get to college. The schools in Milwaukee are a testing ground; this year, Educational Enterprises opened a HOPE-inspired college prep charter elementary school in Phoenix.
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Erica Frankenberg, Genevieve Siegel‐Hawley, and Jia Wang [1.4MB PDF] :
Seven years after the Civil Rights Project first documented extensive patterns of charter school segregation, the charter sector continues to stratify students by race, class and possibly language. This study is released at a time of mounting federal pressure to expand charter schools, despite on-going and accumulating evidence of charter school segregation.More here and here.Our analysis of the 40 states, the District of Columbia, and several dozen metropolitan areas with large enrollments of charter school students reveals that charter schools are more racially isolated than traditional public schools in virtually every state and large metropolitan area in the nation. While examples of truly diverse charter schools exist, our data show that these schools are not reflective of broader charter trends.
Four major themes emerge from this analysis of federal data. First, while charter schools are increasing in number and size, charter school enrollment presently accounts for only 2.5% of all public school students. Despite federal pressure to increase charter schools--based on the notion that charter schools are superior to traditional public schools, in spite of no conclusive evidence in support of that claim--charter school enrollment remains concentrated in just five states.
Second, we show that charter schools, in many ways, have more extensive segregation than other public schools. Charter schools attract a higher percentage of black students than traditional public schools, in part because they tend to be located in urban areas. As a result, charter school enrollment patterns display high levels of minority segregation, trends that are particularly severe for black students.
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A decade ago, most Seattle-area high schools offered just a handful of rigorous classes that provided a way to earn college credit while supercharging a transcript. And only students with top grades were allowed to sign up.Melissa Westbrook has more.But in 10 years, the intensive, fast-paced Advanced Placement (AP) classes have skyrocketed in this state.
In 2008, fully one-quarter of Washington public-school seniors took at least one AP test during their high-school years, compared with 10 percent in 1997. In some schools, almost every student takes an AP class in junior or senior year.
And other schools around the state are moving fast to add AP classes and expand participation, in part because college admissions officials say the demanding classes do a good job of preparing students for higher education.
Many schools are encouraging all students -- not just the high achievers, but also average students and even those who struggle -- to take AP classes or enroll in other rigorous programs such as the International Baccalaureate (IB).
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Yong Zhao is back in receptive Seattle this week preaching his gospel of edu-innovation. The anti-standards, pro-creativity Zhao is a Chinese-born prof at Michigan State. Here's his thesis in a nutshell:In my new book Catching Up or Leading the Way, I mostly focus on issues facing education in the United States noting that the current education reform efforts, with their emphasis on standards, testing, and outcome-based (read test score-based) accountability, are unlikely to make Americans "globally competitive."
Zhao and I like the same schools and probably share a similar vision for what a good education looks like and the benefits it provides students. We both agree that bad standards and tests badly applied is bad for kids.
But his anti-standards mantra strikes me as a bit irresponsible in the sense that he doesn't grapple with accountability. We have NCLB because states were not fulfilling the good school promise--they ignored generations of chronic failure. The Department of Education is now grappling with a new accountability framework, one that is tight on goals and loose on means.
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Carla Rivera: The few dozen nonresident eighth-graders who won't be going to Beverly High as planned say they're left in limbo, not sure where to enroll or how they'll adjust to new academic and social standards.
Taylor Short said the last few weeks have been like walking through a fog, unable to see what's ahead. The Beverly Vista Elementary eighth-grader has no idea where she'll enroll next year. She wonders whether she'll stay in touch with her best friends and feels let down by adults.
David Yona, a top athlete at El Rodeo Elementary, said he had been looking forward to the summer, when sports teams condition and train. Sadness sets in when he thinks about the fun he will probably miss before he starts his freshman year in the fall.
Although Taylor and David live outside the Beverly Hills Unified School District, they have attended its schools for years on special permits. The district's Board of Education voted last month not to renew permits for the eighth-graders and other elementary students. They allowed high school students to continue through graduation.
The district is changing the way it funds schools, declining state money based on student attendance and instead using property-tax revenue. Board members argued that Beverly Hills taxpayers should not subsidize education for nonresidents.
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I realized, talking in office hours with a couple of my law students, that they did not really understand what is meant by the phrase "borrowing from our children" -- as we often hear it raised or referenced these days in budget, deficit, and other policy debates. These are bright students who have often taken some economics, but haven't necessarily learned to think through common economic tropes in current arguments. So it hadn't really occurred to them to ask, what does it mean to "borrow from our children"? The children who mostly don't yet exist, and in any case don't have any money from which to borrow.As soon as it's put that way, it is obvious that what we actually mean is, we will borrow today from people who do have money -- and who are willing to forego consumption today, presumably in China and the rest of Asia -- and our children will repay the principal and interest. We have internalized the consumption (er, investment? -ed.) currently and externalized the repayment. It might be more accurate to say that we have exercised an option with regards to the future -- we are the holders and they the involuntary writers of an option. But the fundamental public policy point is that in order to engage in this borrowing exercise today, even if we are going to "put" the repayment to our children, someone today has to be willing to give up consumption now and lend us those resources today.
To that end, David Sanger has a nice piece in the New York Times Week in Review, "The Debtor the World Still Bets On." While we're at it, Irwin Steltzer's Weekly Standard essay, "Government Intervention Will Leave a Nasty Hangover."
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Seated with a classmate at a table near the Whitnall High School library, freshman Josh Kelly stumbles into trouble with some of his make-up work for history class."There's this artist in the Middle Ages, and I don't know how to spell his name," Josh says as teacher Andrew Baumann comes over quickly to help.
"Oh, Giotto . . . frescoes," Baumann replies, bending over the teenager's textbook. "He basically invented all these new techniques that people after him started using in the Renaissance."
While Baumann is a social studies teacher, he's not technically Josh's social studies teacher. Instead, he's one of two full-time faculty members who staff the school's academic support center, an all-day service where students can come for tutoring, to complete projects or to make up assignments and tests.
It's one of several solutions that high schools have come up with to provide students with more academic help during the school day, as opposed to trying to compete with work, sports and other activities that commonly lure teenagers outside of the school hours.
The year after Whitnall's center started in 2006, Germantown High School initiated one of its own.
Today, it serves between 90 and 120 students a day - enough that Germantown's Academic Support Center teacher, Cindy Collins, had to come up with a new 15-minute pass system to ensure she wasn't turning students away. She also depends on volunteers from the school's junior and senior classes to provide tutoring in easier subjects that freshmen might grapple with during the center's busy times.
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On January 16, Fang Shimin kicked off the new year with a recap of his top 10 news items of 2009. On his popular New Threads blog (www.xys.org), Fang, both respected and hated as the mainland's self-appointed "science cop", revisited a string of startling allegations: 12 university presidents and vice-presidents accused of plagiarism; a university president who claimed a leading scientific prize that was not rightfully his; two professors caught faking research results in an international journal; and a medical doctor who distorted the success rate for a new surgical procedure, which could have had serious health implications....
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When a teacher at Northside Elementary School taught students chess as part of a math enrichment class years ago, she was impressed by how much they enjoyed it."They just really ate it up so we decided to do this after-school club," said teacher Barb Snell.
The weekly Chess Club, which was started about 10 years ago, grew to some 75 students. So this year it was offered to just fourth- and fifth-graders, bringing the number down to 40.
"It works your brain a lot, and it's fun," said fourth-grader Cami Spellman, who also was in the club last year.
Snell, a fourth-grade teacher at Northside, is no longer the chess club adviser.
Fourth-grade teacher Amy Weber, who took over advising the club and who also teaches gifted and talented students at another school, said the club is designed to offer a challenging activity for gifted and talented students, but there are no criteria for joining the club other than being in fourth or fifth grade.
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Ron Huberman, the chief executive of Chicago's public schools, is looking to hire a "Culture of Calm" coordinator to improve conditions in schools deemed most at risk for student violence.The coordinator would work closely with principals on resolving conflicts, providing better emotional support for students, and improving discipline and attendance. The job could pay up to $90,000.
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A woman's chance of having a child with autism increase substantially as she ages, but the risk may be less for older dads than previously suggested, a new study analyzing more than 5 million births found."Although fathers' age can contribute risk, the risk is overwhelmed by maternal age," said University of California at Davis researcher Janie Shelton, the study's lead author.
Mothers older than 40 were about 50 percent more likely to have a child with autism than those in their 20s; the risk for fathers older than 40 was 36 percent higher than for men in their 20s.
Even at that, the study suggests the risk of a woman over 40 having an autistic child was still less than 4 in 1,000, one expert noted.
The new research suggests the father's age appears to make the most difference with young mothers. Among children whose mothers were younger than 25, autism was twice as common when fathers were older than 40 than when dads were in their 20s.
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House lights up!" proclaimed the silver-haired former lawyer who, with blue jeans, black T-shirt, black safari jacket and Nikes, looked oh-so Hollywood in an oh-so Chicago bastion, the Merchandise Mart.As four understudies from the Second City comedy troupe entered the sound stage, they were trailed by film students climaxing three weeks of labor by taping a half-hour faux "Saturday Night Live." It featured comedy sketches, droll pre-taped mock commercials and a live performance by Rhymefest, a hip hop artist.
The students get academic credit by handling sound, cameras, lights and the funny people, all with the help of professionals, and their polished handiwork, "Live at the Mart," may soon be shown on NBC locally or nationally. It underscored the glitz, teamwork and market-driven pragmatism at the core of Chicago's Flashpoint Academy of Media Arts and Sciences, one of the country's most curious and disorienting educational institutions.
Imagine Pixar, Disney, Nintendo and Dreamworks all melded into a vocational setting. Started in 2007, this is a pricey ($25,000 a year) two-year school intended for those not motivated by high school, or brief college stays, but who are captivated by technology.
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On February 4th, King County Superior Court Judge Julie Spector ruled that last year's Seattle School board decision to adopt the Discovering high school textbook series was arbitrary and capricious. Judge Spector's ruling was heard and hailed across the country by private citizens and math education advocacy groups.This unprecedented finding shows school boards and district administration that they need to consider evidence when making decisions. The voice of the community has been upheld by law, but the Seattle School district indicated they plan to appeal, demonstrating the typical arrogant, wasteful practices which necessitated the lawsuit in the first place.
Concerned individuals in Seattle and across the country need to speak up now, and let Seattle administration know that it's time to move forward and refocus on the students, rather than defend a past mistake.
The ruling states:
"The court finds, based upon a review of the entire administrative record, that there is insufficient evidence for any reasonable Board member to approve the selection of the Discovering Series."
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I attended a presentation on Friday by Dr. Rob Stein, principal (and alum) of Manual High School in Denver. Manual HS has been designated an "Innovation School" with approval from its staff and the local & state school boards, which means they, by Colorado state law, can deviate from district and state regulations (but not federal). They are not a charter school - all of their staff are district employees.Well worth reading.Denver's central bureaucracy and expenditures sounded similar to Seattle's. He showed a picture of Denver's policy manuals: thousands of pages occupying an entire shelf. Some were downright comical but illustrative of the dysfunction in public schools. For example, their 98 page union agreement includes "Article 15-1-1: Each school will have a desk and a chair for each teacher, except in unusual circumstances." He was quick to point out that the union is not to blame, but it's symptomatic of a breakdown in trust in a system no longer optimized for student education. He showed the Denver schools org chart with dozens of arrows pointing to all of the folks that a typical principal needs to answer to. He estimated 80+ hours a week just to respond to the emails. More importantly, he calculated $4,157 per student to pay for central staff despite a fuzzy connection to specific student learning in his school.
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Precious Holt, a 12th grader with dangly earrings and a SpongeBob pillow, climbs on the yellow school bus and promptly falls asleep for the hour-plus ride to Sandhills Community College.Once again, the MMSD and State of WI are going in the wrong direction regarding education. Much more on "Credit for non-MMSD courses.When the bus arrives, she checks in with a guidance counselor and heads off to a day of college classes, blending with older classmates until 4 p.m., when she and the other seniors from SandHoke Early College High School gather for the ride home.
There is a payoff for the long bus rides: The 48 SandHoke seniors are in a fast-track program that allows them to earn their high-school diploma and up to two years of college credit in five years -- completely free.
Until recently, most programs like this were aimed at affluent, overachieving students -- a way to keep them challenged and give them a head start on college work. But the goal is quite different at SandHoke, which enrolls only students whose parents do not have college degrees.
Here, and at North Carolina's other 70 early-college schools, the goal is to keep at-risk students in school by eliminating the divide between high school and college.
"We don't want the kids who will do well if you drop them in Timbuktu," said Lakisha Rice, the principal. "We want the ones who need our kind of small setting."
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Gov. Chris Christie and lawmakers of both parties will unveil a series of sweeping pension and benefit reforms Monday that could affect every public employee in New Jersey while saving the state billions of dollars, according to four officials with direct knowledge of the plan.The proposals would require workers and retirees at all levels of government and local school districts to contribute to their own health care costs, ban part-time workers at the state and local levels from participating in the underfunded state pension system, cap sick leave payouts for all public employees and constitutionally require the state to fully fund its pension obligations each year.
Details of the four-bill package to be introduced Monday were provided to The Star-Ledger on the condition of anonymity because the four officials were not authorized to speak in advance.
The proposals go further than several past efforts at reining in taxpayer-funded pension and benefit costs, and if enacted would represent a major early victory for the new Republican governor and Democrats who control the state Legislature. But supporters anticipate an angry response from public employee and teachers unions that wield considerable power throughout the state -- though lawmakers argue rank-and-file workers would have safer pensions than before.
Christie's office declined to comment, as did top Democrats and Republicans involved in crafting the bills.
All sides had made their feelings clear last month, when Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D-Gloucester) announced the upper house's intentions to fix a system that would otherwise "go bankrupt." Lawmakers of both parties pledged their support, with Christie saying "bipartisan action is critical to reforming a broken pension and benefits system."
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North Carolina has dropped the teaching of United States History before 1877 for its public high school students. Quite a number of U.S. History teachers have argued for years that they should have two years for the subject, but North Carolina has just dropped year one.
One argument they advance for doing this is that it will make our history "more relevant" to their students because it will be "closer" to their own lives.
The logical end of this approach will be, I suppose, to constrict the teaching of U.S. History to the latest results for American Idol.
This is just one more egregious consequence of the flight from academic knowledge in our schools.
One of the authors published in The Concord Review wrote more than 13,000 words on Anne Hutchinson, who not only lived before the student did, but even lived and died more than two centuries before 1877. How was this possible? The public high school student (who later graduated summa cum laude from Yale and won a Rhodes Scholarship) read enough about Anne Hutchinson so that her life became relevant enough to the student to let her write a long serious term paper about her.
For students who don't read history, and don't know any history from any other source, of course anything that happened "back then" seems not too relevant to their own lives, whether it is or not.
It is the job of the history teacher to encourage and require students to learn enough history so that what happened in the past is understood to be relevant, whether it is Roman Law, or Greek Philosophy, or the Han Dynasty, or the Glorious Revolution or our own.
If the student (and the teacher) has never read The Federalist Papers, then the whole process by which we formed a strong constitutional government will remain something of a mystery to them, and may indeed seem to be irrelevant to their own lives.
Kieran Egan quotes Bertrand Russell as saying: "the first task of education is to destroy the tyranny of the local and immediate over the child's imagination."
Now, the folks in North Carolina have not completely abandoned their high school history students to American Idol or to only those things that are local and immediate in North Carolina. After all, President Rutherford B. Hayes rarely appears on either local tv or MTV, so it will be a job for teachers to make Rutherfraud seem relevant to their lives. Students will indeed have to learn something about the 1870s and even the 1860s, perhaps, before that time will come to seem at all connected to their own.
But the task of academic work is not to appeal to a student's comfortable confinement to his or her own town, friends, school, and historical time.
Academic work, most especially history, opens the student to the wonderful and terrible events and the notable human beings of the ages. To confine them to what is relevant to them before they do academic work is to attempt to shrink their awareness of the world to an unforgivable degree.
North Carolina has not done that, of course. If they had made an effort to teach United States history in two years, or perhaps, if they decided to allow only one year, many will feel that they should have chosen Year One, instead of starting with Rutherford B. Hayes. These are curricular arguments worth having.
But in no case should educators be justified in supporting academic work that requires less effort on the part of students to understand what is different from them, whether it is Cepheid variable stars, or Chinese characters, or the basics of molecular biology, or calculus, or the proceedings of an American meeting in Philadelphia in 1787.
Our job as educators is to open the whole world of learning to them, to see that they make serious efforts in it, and not to allow them to confine themselves to the ignorance with which they arrive into our care.
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Imagine that your stockbroker - or the friend who's always giving you stock tips - called and told you he had come up with a new investment strategy. Price-to-earnings ratios, debt levels, management, competition, what the company makes, and how well it makes it, all those considerations go out the window. The new strategy is this: Invest in companies with names that are very easy to pronounce.This would probably not strike you as a great idea. But, if recent research is to be believed, it might just be brilliant.
One of the hottest topics in psychology today is something called "cognitive fluency." Cognitive fluency is simply a measure of how easy it is to think about something, and it turns out that people prefer things that are easy to think about to those that are hard. On the face of it, it's a rather intuitive idea. But psychologists are only beginning to uncover the surprising extent to which fluency guides our thinking, and in situations where we have no idea it is at work.
Psychologists have determined, for example, that shares in companies with easy-to-pronounce names do indeed significantly outperform those with hard-to-pronounce names. Other studies have shown that when presenting people with a factual statement, manipulations that make the statement easier to mentally process - even totally nonsubstantive changes like writing it in a cleaner font or making it rhyme or simply repeating it - can alter people's judgment of the truth of the statement, along with their evaluation of the intelligence of the statement's author and their confidence in their own judgments and abilities. Similar manipulations can get subjects to be more forgiving, more adventurous, and more open about their personal shortcomings.
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David Davenport, Gordon Lloyd:
President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan call their $4 billion program of education reform grants the Race to the Top. A more accurate title would be the Race to Washington, because their program culminates a stunning decade in which school policy decisions have been wrested from local and state control to become matters of federal oversight. With the possible exception of Texas - where Gov. Rick Perry is resisting federal education grants with all their strings - no state has been left behind in the race to federalize education.It's easy to miss this important power shift because few of us notice, much less worry about, constitutional processes during a crisis. But, as presidential Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel famously said, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste" because, he continued, it's an opportunity to do things you couldn't do before. And that's precisely what is happening in education as we complete a transfer of money and power to Washington to oversee our schools, in violation of the 10th Amendment, a couple of hundred years of history and common sense.
There is a disturbing pattern of Washington using crises to consolidate power. First we declare war on a problem, which shifts things into crisis mode. Remember the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on illiteracy, the war on terror? Now we have a war on underperforming schools, so naturally Washington needs to step in and nationalize standards and tests.
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Imagine that driving across town, you've fallen into a reverie, meditating on lost loves or calculating your next tax payments. You're so distracted that you rear-end the car in front of you at 10 miles an hour. You probably think: Damn. My fault. My mind just wasn't there.By contrast, imagine that you drive across town in a state of mild exhilaration, multitasking on your way to a sales meeting. You're drinking coffee and talking to your boss on a cellphone, practicing your pitch. You cause an identical accident. You've heard all the warnings about cellphones and driving--but on a gut level, this wreck might bewilder you in a way that the first scenario didn't. Wasn't I operating at peak alertness just then? Your brain had been aroused to perform several tasks, and you had an illusory sense that you must be performing them well.
That illusion of competence is one of the things that worry scholars who study attention, cognition, and the classroom. Students' minds have been wandering since the dawn of education. But until recently--so the worry goes--students at least knew when they had checked out. A student today who moves his attention rapid-fire from text-messaging to the lecture to Facebook to note-taking and back again may walk away from the class feeling buzzed and alert, with a sense that he has absorbed much more of the lesson than he actually has.
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OF all the supplies at Haven Academy, a charter school in the South Bronx, none matter as much as the squishy. Like any elementary school, Haven has pencils, books and desks. But it is the squishy -- a colorful rubber ball with dozens of tentacles that can withstand the strength of any young student -- that daily absorbs a fit of anger or a mess of tears.In the office of Jessica Nauiokas, the principal, a forlorn little boy yanks at a squishy and an angry little girl tosses one like a yo-yo. When Marquis, 6, was kicking and screaming one recent morning, a purple squishy was the only thing that could calm him.
Marquis, a kindergartner, had grown so frustrated with reading that he crawled under a table while other students wrote their alphabet letters; then he threw a chair across the room. Gabriella Cassandra, the school's social worker, literally carried him to the principal's office, where he again crawled under a chair.
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New Chef Will Help Pastry Level to Rise
Restaurants like Charlie Trotter's, Tru and Per Se all have alumni of the French Pastry School in their kitchens.
Chicago has long attracted ambitious immigrants from all corners of the world. World champion bakers from tiny Alsatian villages are not usually among them.Pierre Zimmermann may well be the first when he arrives in August to join the faculty of Chicago's French Pastry School. Mr. Zimmermann stands out in the tightly-knit and highly competitive international baking scene as the latest in four generations of his family who have run a boulangerie-patisserie in Schnersheim.
Mr. Zimmermann, 45, won the World Cup of Baking as a member of France's gold medal team at the 1996 Coupe du Monde de laBoulangerie and coached France's 2008 World Cup of Baking championship team.
The pedigree, and Mr. Zimmermann's deft touch with a baguette, made him such an attraction that the Loop school pursued him for four years.
That he chose to give up his job as "the little baker of my village," as he put it in a recent e-mail translated from French, is a testament to Chicago's importance among food cognoscenti and the French Pastry School's growing reputation.
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COLUMBUS, Ohio - The leader of the country's largest university thinks it's time to re-examine how professors are awarded tenure, a type of job-for-life protection virtually unknown outside academia.Ohio State University President Gordon Gee says the traditional formula that rewards publishing in scholarly journals over excellence in teaching and other contributions is outdated and too often favors the quantity of a professor's output over quality.
"Someone should gain recognition at the university for writing the great American novel or for discovering the cure for cancer," he told The Associated Press. "In a very complex world, you can no longer expect everyone to be great at everything."
Plenty of people have raised the issue over the years, but Gee is one of the few American college presidents with the reputation and political prowess -- not to mention the golden touch at fundraising -- who might be able to begin the transformation.
Still, some professors are already skeptical.
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Decision favors plaintiffs in court challenge of Seattle math text adoptionStatement from Laurie Rogers:
Last year, Seattle Public Schools adopted the Discovering math series despite valiant opposition from parents and math professionals, despite poor assessments of the Discovering series' rigor and adherence to the new state math standards, and despite the fact that OSPI did NOT ultimately recommend the Discovering math series.
In response, three people filed a lawsuit, saying that Seattle didn't have sufficient supporting evidence for its adoption, and also that the Discovering series was associated with an INCREASE in achievement gaps.Recently, a judge agreed with the plaintiffs and - while stopping short of telling Seattle to cease and desist in their adoption - told Seattle to revisit its adoption. The district can continue to use the Discovering series, and Seattle administrators have stated their clear intention to do so.
Nevertheless, the court decision is momentous. It sets a precedent for districts across the country. When board members can't justify their adoption decisions, the people now have legal recourse.
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Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman, via a kind reader's email.
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You can bet that the state Department of Public Instruction won't carry out its threat to withhold a bazillion dollars from Milwaukee Public Schools because MPS is not showing as much urgency as desired about making changes. (What in the world would make DPI think that?)That doesn't mean the threat is not an important matter and that it isn't part of developments that could have a real impact. DPI leaders might be able to turn this into a way to force MPS to take more energetic steps, especially around special education and struggling students of all kinds.
The fact that DPI has the power to make a threat like this illustrates forcefully the changing picture of power when it comes to MPS. In fact, assuming a contract is signed in the next few days with Gregory Thornton, the School Board's choice to be the new MPS superintendent, he will be only one of a roster of chief executives over aspects of Milwaukee schools, as I see it.
Here's a guide to some of the folks at the center of the action these days:
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Our last article summarized the current state of research on teens and risk. That research demonstrates that teenagers do not suffer from some special inability to reason. Larry Steinberg and other researchers explain the steep rise in risk-taking behavior that comes with puberty by elaborating the interplay between two brain systems. The social-emotional system, which develops robustly in early adolescence, seeks out rewarding experiences, especially the sensation afforded by novel and risky behavior, and is also activated by the presence of peers. The cognitive-control system, which undergoes its great burst of development in later adolescence, evaluates and governs the impulses of the social-emotional system.During the years of greatest risk-taking, which peak somewhere around the age of 16 and during which the presence of peers greatly increases risk-taking, the adolescent brain is like a car with a powerful accelerator (the sensation- and peer-seeking social-emotional system) and weak brakes (the risk-containing cognitive-control system). That being the case, it's clear why some common approaches to reducing risk-taking by teenagers--explaining why drunk driving is dangerous, asking them to pledge to abstain from premarital sex--don't work very well.
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The outlook for new teachers is dim this year, prompting Chandler school officials to limit their recruiting efforts to science, math and special-education teachers for the first time.Although other teachers are not being turned away, the Chandler Unified School Districts is focusing on hard-to-fill science, math and special-education teaching jobs for its Feb. 18 recruiting fair.
"This is our first year . . . . . we're not having a general recruitment fair because of there are fewer needs, fewer positions openings than in the past," said Laura Nook, the district's human-resources director.
The district doesn't yet know how many new teachers it will need next school year. Demand depends on student enrollment, the number of returning teachers and whether the Arizona Legislature again cuts K-12 funding to balance the state budget.
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Admissions officers more than a year ago started noticing something odd about the Facebook groups built around their incoming classes: The creators weren't newly admitted students. Or current students. Or alums. Or anyone with any tie to the universities.Brad J. Ward, who then worked in the Butler University admissions office, began to compare the groups from colleges across the country -- including Georgetown, Virginia Tech and George Washington University -- and realized they were all created by the same handful of people. "There's something going down on Facebook. Pay attention," he wrote on his blog, Squared Peg, in December 2008
With help from admissions workers across the country, Ward traced these individuals to College Prowler, a Pittsburgh-based company that publishes campus guidebooks, and a not-yet-launched roommate-matching Web site called MatchU, started by a recent college graduate named Justin Gaither.
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A King County Superior Court judge today ruled the state does not provide ample funding for basic education then directed the Legislature to establish the cost of providing all Washington children with a basic education and establish how it will fully fund such education with stable and dependable state sources.In his oral ruling this morning in McCleary v. State, also known as the "Basic Education case," King County Superior Court Judge John Erlick also indicated the state's 2009 education funding measure (HB 2261) could be a means to satisfy this direction. The court e-mailed the entire 73-page ruling to counsel immediately following the hearing.
"Judge Erlick rightly recognizes in his ruling the Legislature's authority to set education funding policy," said Attorney General Rob McKenna. "The Legislature took positive steps with its 2009 education funding reform efforts, and we understand the decision to suggest those reforms could be the basis for progress in this case.
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Influencing practice and policy in science education is what drives ASU's Julie Luft and has led to her distinguished service to K-12 science teacher education and renowned research contributions to the field. She considers her recent call from Congress to testify about the status and future of science education to be among her most notable achievements.Luft delivered her first-time testimony before the House Commerce, Justice, and Science Subcommittee at the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) Education Hearings that took place Feb. 3-4. She was joined by Craig Strang, associate director of the Lawrence Hall of Science at University of California-Berkeley.
The purpose of the hearing was to inform Congressional subcommittee members about the status and future direction of STEM education in the K-12 sector. STEM education is considered vital to maintaining the United States' leadership in the rapidly advancing world of science and technology. In her testimony, Luft emphasized the importance of inquiry in teacher education and professional development, and the need for more federal funding to support science organizations involved in research and development. She also stressed the unintended consequences of the federal No Child Left Behind legislation, which has limited the amount of inquiry-based instruction in K-12 science classrooms.
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This is going to be awkward, but someone has to tell you, so it may as well be me: you're kind of a loser. You know that feeling you sometimes have that your friends have more friends than you? You're right. They do. And you know how almost everyone at the gym seems in better shape than you, and how everyone at your book club seems better read? Well, they are. If you're single, it's probably a while since you dated - what with you being such a loser - but when you did, do you recall thinking the other person was more romantically experienced than you? I'm afraid it was probably true.The only consolation in all this is that it's nothing personal: it's a bizarre statistical fact that almost all of us have fewer friends than our friends, more flab than our fellow gym-goers, and so on. In other words, you're a loser, but it's not your fault: it's just maths. (I mean, it's probably just maths. You might be a catastrophic failure as a human being, for all I know. But let's focus on the maths.)
To anyone not steeped in statistics, this seems crazy. Friendship is a two-way street, so you'd assume things would average out: any given person would be as likely to be more popular than their friends as less. But as the sociologist Scott Feld showed, in a 1991 paper bluntly entitled Why Your Friends Have More Friends Than You Do, this isn't true. If you list all your friends, and then ask them all how many friends they have, their average is very likely to be higher than your friend count.
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Last week the Capital Times ran a story about how Tom Hardin, the head coach of forensics and drama at James Madison Memorial High School, plans to retire from coaching at the end of the season. There was even a follow up blog by the Capitol Times reacting to the discussion of the story.More here.As an assistant coach for Memorial forensics and debate program for several years, I read the paper and the comments in the online version with a more critical eye than others. It's worthwhile to point out that I am extremely biased on this issue. Tom Hardin and Tim Scheffler taught me how to be a speech and debate coach and gave me a job that supported me throughout my post secondary education.
My responses to the news and comments are as follows:
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Opponents of a controversial sex ed bill passed by Wisconsin legislators last week warn that if Gov. Jim Doyle signs the bill into law as he has promised, some local school districts will stage a revolt against the measure by ignoring it or dropping their human growth and development curriculum entirely."Did the state in its zeal to impose its own way even think about the consequences? Because a lot of districts are just going to just walk," predicts Matt Sande, director of legislation at Pro-Life Wisconsin.
The proposed new law would require any Wisconsin public school district that offers a course in human growth and development -- or sexual education -- to teach students about sexually transmitted diseases and methods of safe sex, including contraception. Under current law districts can choose to provide only instruction focusing on abstinence or chastity.
The proposed new law doesn't require school districts to offer such courses at all, however. School districts can drop their sex ed classes completely rather than comply, which is what Julaine Appling, president of Wisconsin Family Action, says her organization will encourage them to do in upcoming mailings. "This is a Planned Parenthood dream come true," Appling says about the bill. "They have taken options away from local school districts. Now the choice is something Madison says is best or to have no human growth and development classes at all, which, quite honestly, is the better choice."
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In an action that's likely to be repeated across the state, the West Bend School District is preparing to take contract negotiations with its teachers to arbitration, potentially among the first districts to do so since the Legislature removed teacher salary controls that held sway in Wisconsin for 16 years.Related: Madison School District & Madison Teachers Union Reach Tentative Agreement: 3.93% Increase Year 1, 3.99% Year 2; Base Rate $33,242 Year 1, $33,575 Year 2: Requires 50% MTI 4K Members and will "Review the content and frequency of report cards".District negotiators and representatives for the West Bend Education Association have their first mediation session scheduled for next week, the first step they need to take before they can proceed to binding arbitration.
Administrators say they would prefer being able to resolve their issues with the teachers union by settling a contract through the mediation process. But they also say they are willing to go to arbitration if needed.
"We're not afraid of it," said Bill Bracken, labor relations coordinator for Davis & Kuelthau, which is representing the school district.
Other districts apparently aren't afraid either. At least a couple of school districts outside southeastern Wisconsin are getting ready to certify their final offers after already going through the mediation process, indicating binding arbitration is probable, said Scott Mikesh, a staff attorney with the Wisconsin Association of School Boards.
On Friday, the Elmbrook School District and its teachers union announced they were filing for mediation help in their contract negotiations, although Assistant Superintendent Christine Hedstrom said the two sides were not filing for help with the state and won't automatically go to arbitration if they reach deadlock.
It would be interesting to compare contracts/proposals among similarly sized Districts.
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In my recent post, Race to the Top?: Part I, I described the academic achievement rat race in which students near the top of the educational food chain strive maniacally to win (or at least finish). I argued that the emphasis on testing by former President Bush's No Child Left Behind law (NCLB) and continued with President Obama's Race to the Top initiative (RTTT) has only exacerbated the problem better characterized by the title of the powerful new documentary by Vicki Abeles, Race to Nowhere. This post, in contrast, explores how RTTT impacts those students and schools at the other end of the educational food chain, those who are just trying to survive in the turbulent sea of American public education.The first mistake that this administration made was to call education reform a race. Races connote winners and losers. Yet, we need to ensure that all our students and schools are winners. I think a more appropriate name for this initiative is "Climb to the Top" because the focus should be on how to get to the top.
The administration's second mistake was to continue Bush's initial mistake of focusing on testing; instead of being a tool for education reform, testing has morphed into the end-all, be-all of said reform. Yes, assessment is essential for determining the effectiveness of programs such as RTTT, aimed at achieving something as ethereal and elusive as education reform or the more tangible goal of closing the education and economic gaps between the haves and have-nots. At the same time, improved test scores should not be the ultimate objective of education reform.
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AI researchers in the 80s ran into a problem: the more their systems knew, the slower they ran. Whereas we know that people who learn more tend to get faster (and better in other ways) at whatever it is they're doing.The solution, of course, is: Duh. the brain doesn't work like a von Neumann model with an active processor and passive memory. It has, in a simplified sense, a processor per fact, one per memory. If I hold up an object and ask you what it is, you don't calculate some canonicalization of it as a key into an indexed database. You compare it simultaneously to everything you've ever seen (and still remember). Oh, yeah, that's that potted aspidistra that Aunt Suzie keeps in her front hallway, with the burn mark from the time she ...
The processing power necessary to to that kind of parallel matching is high, but not higher than the kind of processing power that we already know the brain has. It's also not higher than the processing power we expect to be able to throw at the problem by 2020 or so. Suppose it takes a million ops to compare a sensed object to a memory. 10 MIPS to do it in a tenth of a second. A modern workstation with 10 gigaops could handle 1000 concepts. A GPGPU with a teraops could handle 100K, which is still probably in the hypohuman range. By 2020, a same priced GPGPU could do 10M concepts, which is right smack in the human range by my best estimate.
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Judge Julie Spector's decision [69K PDF], via Martha McLaren:
THIS MATTER having come on for hearing, and the Court having considered the pleadings, administrative record, and argument in this matter, the Court hereby enters the following Findings of Fact, Conclusions of Law, and Order:Melissa Westbrook has more.FINDINGS OF FACT
1. On May 6, 2009, in a 4-3 vote, the Seattle School District Board of Directors chose the Discovering Series as the District's high school basic math materials.a. A recommendation from the District's Selection Committee;
b. A January, 2009 report from the Washington State Office of Public Instruction ranking High School math textbooks, listing a series by the Holt Company as number one, and the Discovering Series as number two;
c. A March 11, 2009, report from the Washington State Board of Education finding that the Discovering Series was "mathematically unsound";
d. An April 8, 2009 School Board Action Report authored by the Superintendent;
e. The May 6, 2009 recommendation of the OSPI recommending only the Holt Series, and not recommending the Discovering Series;
f. WASL scores showing an achievement gap between racial groups;
g. WASL scores from an experiment with a different inquiry-based math text at Cleveland and Garfield High Schools, showing that W ASL scores overall declined using the inquiry-based math texts, and dropped significantly for English Language Learners, including a 0% pass rate at one high school;
h. The National Math Achievement Panel (NMAP) Report;
1. Citizen comments and expert reports criticizing the effectiveness of inquiry-based math and the Discovering Series;
J. Parent reports of difficulty teaching their children using the Discovering Series and inquiry-based math;
k. Other evidence in the Administrative Record;
I. One Board member also considered the ability of her own child to learn math using the Discovering Series.
3. The court finds that the Discovering Series IS an inquiry-based math program.
4. The court finds, based upon a review of the entire administrative record, that there IS insufficient evidence for any reasonable Board member to approve the selection of the Discovering Series.CONCLUSIONS OF LAW
I. The court has jurisdiction under RCW 28A.645.010 to evaluate the Board's decision for whether it is arbitrary, capricious, or contrary to law;2. The Board's selection of the Discovering Series was arbitrary;
3. The Board's selection of the Discovering Series was capricious;
4. This court has the authority to remand the Board's decision for further review;
5. Any Conclusion of Law which is more appropriately characterized as a
Finding of Fact is adopted as such, and any Finding of Fact more appropriately
characterized as a Conclusion of Law is adopted as such.ORDER
IT IS HEREBY ORDERED:
The decision of the Board to adopt the Discovering Series is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.Dated this 4th day of February, 2010.
Seattle Math Group Press Release:
Judge Julie Spector today announced her finding of "arbitrary and capricious" in the Seattle School Board's May 6 vote to adopt the Discovering Math series of high school texts despite insufficient evidence of the series' effectiveness.Judge Spector's decision states, "The court finds, based upon a review of the entire administrative record, that there is insufficient evidence for any reasonable Board member to approve the selection of the Discovering series."
Plaintiffs DaZanne Porter, an African American and mother of a 9th-grade student in Seattle Public Schools, Martha McLaren, retired Seattle math teacher and grandparent of a Seattle Public Schools fifth grader, and Cliff Mass, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Washington, had filed their appeal of the Board's controversial decision on June 5th, 2009. The hearing was held on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010
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The number of students taking Advanced Placement tests hit a record high last year, but the portion who fail the exams -- particularly in the South -- is rising as well, a USA TODAY analysis finds.Jay Matthews has more.
Students last year took a record 2.9 million exams through the AP program, which challenges high school students with college-level courses. Passing the exams (a score of 3 or higher on the point scale of 1 to 5) may earn students early college credits, depending on a college's criteria.MARYLAND: A model in AP access, achievement.
The findings about the failure rates raise questions about whether schools are pushing millions of students into AP courses without adequate preparation -- and whether a race for higher standards means schools are not training enough teachers to deliver the high-level material.
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Skylar Shafran, a turquoise headband on her brunette head and a pink princess shirt on her string-bean frame, is standing on a chair in her living room, shifting from left foot to right. She has already gulped down a glass of orange juice and nibbled on some crackers; she has also demonstrated, with extemporaneous grace, the ability to pick up Hello Kitty markers with her toes. For more than an hour, she has been answering questions to a mock version of an intelligence test commonly known to New York parents as the ERB. Almost every prestigious private elementary school in the city requires that prospective kindergartners take it. Skylar's parents, Liz and Jay, are pretty sure they know where they're sending their daughter to school next year, but they figure it can't hurt to get a sense of where she sits in the long spectrum of precocious New York children. And so, although it wasn't cheap--$350--they've hired someone to find out. Skylar has thus far borne this process with cheerful patience and determination. But every 4-year-old has her limits.David Shenk has more."What is an umbrella?" asks the evaluator, a psychology graduate student in her mid-twenties.
"To keep me dry."
"And what is a book?"
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U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is expected to travel to Alabama next month to help Gov. Bob Riley persuade lawmakers to pass legislation allowing charter schools, Riley said Wednesday."As a Republican I've always pushed for charter schools . . . but when I say it, it doesn't have the legitimacy and credibility that the secretary of education and president of the United States has," Riley said after meeting with Duncan Wednesday afternoon in Washington.
President Obama's administration is preparing to hand out more than $4 billion to help states improve their public schools, and those without charter schools -- like Alabama --- are at a competitive disadvantage for the money.
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In a valiant attempt to defuse the ideological conflicts between the reformist and traditionalist wings of the liberal education wonketariat, Matthew Yglesias argues that this disagreement is not not ideological at all. Rather, it is an artifact of past decisions about educational structure:Take, for example, the hot issue of teacher compensation. The traditionalist view is that teachers should get paid more for having more years of experience and also for having more degrees. The reform view is that teachers should get paid more for having demonstrated efficacy in raising student test scores. This is an important debate, but I think it's really not an ideological debate at all. I think the only reason it's taken on an ideological air is that unions have a view on the matter and people do have ideological opinions about unions in general. But if we found a place where for decades teachers had been paid based on demonstrated efficacy in raising student test scores, then veteran teachers and union leaders would probably be people who liked that system and didn't want to change to a degree-based system. Because unions are controversial, this would take on a certain left-right ideological atmosphere but it's all very contingent.This is a very interesting thesis, but ultimately I think it's wrong. There is a reason that unions kill merit pay, and it's not because they just happened to solidify in an era when merit pay was out of fashion.
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Two months back, tiny Lincoln University attracted worldwide media attention when it threatened to withhold diplomas from overweight students unless they took a special fitness class.Under its 2005 policy, which the Philadelphia area school rescinded in December after weeks of criticism from activists and the media, students with body mass indexes (BMI) over 30 were required to take a one-credit class called "Fitness for Life" in order to graduate from the historically black college. A person with a BMI of 30 is considered obese under health guidelines.
We'll get back to Lincoln. But the controversy made me curious about the role our schools are playing in our children's fitness and whether they are having any impact in the so far losing effort against the obesity epidemic.
When I went to high school in the early 1970s, phys ed was a requirement: three periods a week, if memory serves, through junior year. Team sports reigned. The athletic kids would park me on the offensive line during flag football and tell me to stay out of the way on the basketball floor. Let's not even bring up Greco-Roman wrestling.
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Twelve central Ohio schools are among the worst 5 percent statewide.Their academic struggles mean they are eligible to receive federal money to help them transform or start over. A list of these schools was released yesterday by the Ohio Department of Education.
Six Columbus City Schools buildings are on the list of the worst-off, as are four in Cleveland and 16 in Cincinnati. Several charter schools -- six of them in central Ohio -- also made the "top" rung on the list.
"No one is going to like the fact that they're on this list," said Mark Real, who heads the Columbus-based nonprofit KidsOhio, which studies education issues. He's been monitoring stimulus-related spending and improvement programs. "But this is not just a 'label and leave it' approach. These schools are in for some pretty intensive care."
These schools all have a large number of poor students and have been mired in academic difficulties for several years.
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There's not much young blood in the Warwick school system and according to a top administrator - that's costly.There are currently 1,051 teachers in the Warwick School Department. Out of those teachers, 865 - or 82 percent of the department - rank in the top three "steps".
All things considered, those highest paid teachers earned an average of $75,400 last year - according to Rosemary Healey, the school department's Director of Compliance. That number represents compensation but excludes benefits such as health care and pensions.
Those 865 teachers earned a combined pay of $65,220,792.36. The school department's total budget this fiscal year, which runs from July 1 until June 30 of this year, is just under $170 million.
The number includes a teacher's base pay, longevity, and stipends paid to teachers for having attained various educational achievements - including a Master's Degree or Doctorate, or advanced certifications.
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Wisconsin's Superintendent of Public Instruction took the first formal step Thursday toward withholding millions of dollars from Milwaukee Public Schools because of the district's failure to show progress on improvement actions ordered by the state.Superintendent Tony Evers officially notified the district that he would seek to "reduce to zero" all administrative funds and defer all programmatic funds that MPS currently receives to serve low-income children, unless the district could prove that it's made progress in key areas of its corrective action plan.
"I don't believe appropriate progress has been made in benchmark areas," Evers said in an interview. "I can't stand by and wait any longer."
The state issued corrective action orders to MPS last summer because of the district's failure to make adequate yearly progress on state test scores for five consecutive years under the No Child Left Behind law.
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We have received several letters over the last few days. I am posting here all of them for which I have received the author's permission for your review. I had to reformat them for this forum, so i apologize if anything got mangled in the process:____________________________________________________________________________
Dear School Board Members,I am writing to urge you to keep 4th grade strings and specifically Jill Jensen on board in our schools. I know how difficult and painful the process of making budget cuts is--if anything, we would all like to see more programs available to our kids, let alone cut what we already have. I am fairly new to Monona, having moved here a year and a half ago, and have been extremely impressed by the 4th and 5th grade performances organized by Jill. It is obvious that she puts in many extra hours and goes far above and beyond her duties as a classroom teacher, because it is one thing--and hard enough--to teach a group of kids the mechanics involved in learning to read and perform music. It is another thing entirely to connect with children so closely and so well as to inspire obvious the joy and enthusiasm for performing that I have seen bursting forth in every one of their concerts that I have attended.
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The Asbury Park Press slams the Marlboro Board of Education for taking a hard line with the local teachers union during contract negotiations and then, apparently, folding after two years of an escalating impasse. If only it were that simple.Here's how it works in N.J.: as the end of a typically-three-year contract approaches, a school board, represented by an attorney, and the local NJEA chapter, represented by NJEA reps, exchange proposals and proceed with negotiating everything from minor changes in contract language to salary increases and contributions (or not) to health benefits. If the two sides reach an impasse (usually once they hit salary and benefits, but sometimes over a seemingly insurmountable semantic technicality), they call in a state-appointed mediator who proposes a compromise. If one or both sides reject the compromise, they go to a state-appointed fact-finder who recommends a settlement. (Here's Marlboro's fact-finder's report.) If that doesn't work, they go to someone called a super conciliator, who writes up a lengthy resolution to the impasse. None of these interventions are binding.
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A bill that would prohibit school districts from paying the salaries of teachers who leave the classroom to engage in union activities cleared its first legislative hurdle Tuesday.Several Utah school districts now pay a portion of their local union presidents' salaries even though they no longer teach, and the union pays the rest of their salaries according to contract agreements. Sen. Margaret Dayton's bill, SB77, would prohibit districts from paying those on association leave and require that if a teacher or employee leaves "regular school responsibilities" for association or union duties that the employee, association or union reimburse the district for that time.
Dayton said the bill is about "keeping taxpayer dollars allocated for education in the classroom."
Others, however, opposed the bill, saying the decision should be left up to local districts. Local union presidents have said that many of their duties, such as representing teachers on district committees and resolving conflicts, benefit both the union and the district.
"The functions [they] carry out are things the district would have to have people do or reassign staff to do," said Susan Kuziak, of the Utah Education Association.
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via a kind reader's email:
Related: Dane County High School AP Course Offering Comparison. Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Late last week I had an interesting telephone conversation with D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee. She called with a comment on a post in which I suggested she be more careful of her public words--like her statement that some of the teachers she fired hit or had sex with kids--in order to make sure she stays in her job and applies her considerable skills and knowledge to fixing our failing school system.I suggested she apologize for offending teachers with her words so that we could get past this point and back to helping kids.
She said, in essence, that she is not going to do that. She said she wished that the Fast Company magazine item that sparked the controversy had included her statement that many of the teachers she had to fire for budget reasons were good people. But, she said, she was not going to compromise her methods or her beliefs. Some teachers did hit kids and have sex with kids, she said. She thought that was something people should know. It was important to root out such behaviors.
She had taken the chancellor job, which she did not seek, with the understanding she would do things her way. She had seen many big city superintendents do the more conventional thing, watch their words and try not to offend. She thinks that approach has not been successful.
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On Feb. 1, President Obama vowed to toss out the nation's current school accountability system and replace it with a more balanced scorecard of school performance that looks at student growth and school progress.I love the idea. Mr. Obama and education secretary Arne Duncan have repeatedly criticized the No Child Left Behind Act for keeping the "goals loose but the steps tight." On their watch, both men aspire to introduce a new law that keeps the "goals tight but the steps loose."
With that more flexible standard in mind, I have a scorecard to propose: the ABC's of School Success. It provides both structure and freedom by identifying five universal measurement categories -- Achievement, Balance, Climate, Democratic Practices and Equity -- and letting individual schools chose which data points to track under each category.
1. ACHIEVEMENT
If there is a bottom line in schools today, it's that educators must do whatever it takes to help close the achievement gap and improve student learning. To do so effectively and fully, schools must expand their measures for determining student achievement. After all, "achievement" isn't only about student test scores; it's also about other factors. The following are all critical to achievement:
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Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
February 3, 2010
I got a call the other day from the head football coach at one of the larger state universities.
He said, after the usual greetings, "I've got some real problems."
"Like what?" I asked.
"The players I am getting now are out of shape, they don't know how to block or tackle, then can't read the playbook and they can't follow their assignments."
"That does sound bad. What is your record this season?"
"The teams we play seem to have similar problems, so all our games are pretty sad affairs, ending in scoreless ties."
"Also," he told me, "During breaks in practice, most of them are text-messaging their friends, and almost half of them just drop out of college after a year or two !"
"Have you talked to any of the high school coaches who send you players?"
"No, I don't know them."
"Have you visited any of the high school games or practices?"
"No, I really don't have time for that sort of thing."
"Well, have you heard there is a big new push for Common National Athletic Standards?"
"No, but do you think that will help solve my problems? Are they really specific this time, for a change?"
"Absolutely," I said. "They want to require high school students, before they graduate, to be able to do five sit-ups, five pushups, and to run 100 yards without stopping. They also recommend that students spend at least an hour a week playing catch with a ball!"
"That is a start, I guess, but I don't think it will help me much with my problem. My U.S. players have just not been prepared at all for college football. I have a couple of immigrant kids, from Asia and Eastern Europe, who are in good shape, have been well coached at the secondary level, and they have a degree of motivation to learn and determination to do their best that puts too many of our local kids to shame."
"Well," I said, "what do you think of the idea of getting to know some of the coaches at the high schools which are sending you players, and letting them know the problems that you are having?"
"I could do that, I guess, but I don't know any of them, and we never meet, and I am really too busy at my level, when it comes down to it, to make that effort."
[If we were talking about college history professors, this would not be fiction. They do complain about the basic knowledge of their students, and their inability to read books and write term papers. But like their fictional coaching counterpart, they never talk to high school history teachers (they don't know any), they never visit their classrooms, and they satisfy themselves with criticizing the students they get from the admissions office. Their interest in National Common Academic Standards does not extend to their suggesting that high school students should read complete nonfiction books and write a serious research paper every year. In short, they, like the fictional head coach, don't really care if students are so poorly prepared for college that half of them drop out, and that most of them do not arrive on campus prepared to do college work. They are really too busy, you see...]
===========
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
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TJ Mertz comments on Monday evening's Madison School Board 2010-2011 budget discussion (video - the budget discussion begins about 170 minutes into the meeting). The discussion largely covered potential property tax increases. However and unfortunately, I've not seen a document that includes total revenue projections for 2010-2011.
The District's Administration's last public total 2009-2010 revenue disclosure ($418,415,780) was in October 2009.
Property tax revenue is one part of the MMSD's budget picture. State and Federal redistributed tax dollars are another big part. The now dead "citizens budget" was a useful effort to provide more transparency to the public. I hope that the Board pushes for a complete picture before any further substantive budget discussions. Finally, the Administration promised program reviews as part of the "Strategic Planning Process" and the recent referendum ("breathing room"). The documents released to date do not include any substantive program review budget items.
Ed Hughes (about 190 minutes): "it is worth noting that evening if we taxed to the max and I don't think we'll do that, the total expenditures for the school District will be less than we were projecting during the referendum". The documents published, as far as I can tell, on the school board's website do not reflect 2010-2011 total spending.
Links to Madison School District spending since 2007 (the referendum Ed mentioned was in 2008)
Further, the recent "State of the District" document [566K PDF] includes only the "instructional" portion of the District's budget. There are no references to the $418,415,780 total budget number provided in the October 26, 2009 "Budget Amendment and Tax Levy Adoption document [1.1MB PDF]. Given the organization's mission and the fact that it is a taxpayer supported and governed entity, the document should include a simple "citizen's budget" financial summary. The budget numbers remind me of current Madison School Board member Ed Hughes' very useful 2005 quote:
This points up one of the frustrating aspects of trying to follow school issues in Madison: the recurring feeling that a quoted speaker - and it can be someone from the administration, or MTI, or the occasional school board member - believes that the audience for an assertion is composed entirely of idiots.In my view, while some things within our local public schools have become a bit more transparent (open enrollment, fine arts, math, TAG), others, unfortunately, like the budget, have become much less. This is not good.
Ed, Lucy and Arlene thankfully mentioned that the Board needs to have the full picture before proceeding.
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via a kind reader's email: 14MB PDF:
January 15, 2010 Dear Secretary Duncan:
On behalf of Wisconsin's school children, we are pleased to present to you our application for the US Department of Education's Race to the Top program. We were honored when President Obama traveled to Wisconsin to announce his vision for this vital program and we are ready to accept the President's challenge to make education America's mission.
We are proud of the steps we are taking to align our assessments with high standards, foster effective teachers and leaders, raise student achievement and transform our lowest performing schools. Over the last several months Wisconsin has pushed an educational reform agenda that has brought together over 430 Wisconsin school districts and charter schools together around these central themes.
Race to the Top funding will be instrumental in supporting and accelerating Wisconsin's education agenda. While Wisconsin has great students, parents, teachers and leaders we recognize that more must be done to ensure that our students are prepared to compete in a global economy. The strong application presented to you today does just that.
Wisconsin's application contains aggressive goals supported by a comprehensive plan. These goals are targeted at not only high performing schools and students but also address our lowest performers. For example, over the next four years Wisconsin, with your support, is on track to:
- Ensure all of our children are proficient in math and reading.
- Drastically reduce the number of high school dropouts.
- Increase the high school graduation growth rate for Native American, African American and Hispanic students.
- Significantly increase the annual growth in college entrance in 2010 and maintain that level of growth over the next four years.
- Drastically cut our achievement gap.
These goals are supported by a comprehensive plan with a high degree of accountability. Our plan is focused on research proven advancements that tackle many of the challenges facing Wisconsin schools. Advancements such as the following:
The agenda that you have before you is one that builds on our great successes yet recognizes that we can and must do more to ensure our children are prepared for success. We appreciate your consideration of Wisconsin's strong commitment to this mission. We look forward to joining President Obama and you in America's Race to the Top.
- Raising standards -- joined consortium with 48 other states to develop and adopt internationally benchmarked standards.
- More useful assessments -- changes to our testing process to provide more meaningful information to teachers and parents.
- Expanded data systems -- including the ability to tie students to teachers so that we can ultimately learn what works and what doesn't in education.
- More support for teachers -- both for new teachers through mentoring and for other teachers through coaching.
- Increased capacity at the state and regional level to assist with instructional improvement efforts including providing training for coaches and mentors.
- An emphasis on providing additional supports, particularly in early childhood and middle school to high school transition, to ensure that Wisconsin narrows its achievement gap and raises overall achievement.
- Turning around our lowest performing schools -- enhancing the capacity for Milwaukee Public Schools and the state to support that effort; contracting out to external organizations with research-proven track records where appropriate.
- Providing wraparound services, complimenting school efforts in specific neighborhoods in Milwaukee to get low income children the supports necessary to succeed within and outside the school yard.
- Investing in STEM -- Building off our currently successful Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology efforts to ensure that more students have access to high-quality STEM courses and training.
Sincerely, Jim Doyle
Governor
Tony Evers
State Superintendent
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Stanford's successful effort to exempt itself from Santa Clara County's new rules on underage drinking has put a focus on the university's growing effort to curb alcohol abuse on campus.The county's new ordinance, which took effect last year, makes it easier for police to cite anyone hosting a party where underage drinking occurs. It can mean a fine of up to $1,000 plus costs anytime the police are called in.
About 95 percent of Stanford's 6,600 undergraduates, many of them younger than 21, live on campus in university-owned housing. As the landlord, the school could have found itself facing plenty of potential liability under the new county rules.
But the financial question didn't play a role in the university's attempt to persuade county officials to free Stanford from the regulations, said Jean McCown, the school's director of community relations.
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IT IS HARD to square the words of American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten with the actions of many of her union's officials. Even as Ms. Weingarten issues stirring calls for new ways of thinking, labor leaders in places such as New York use their political muscle to block important reforms. Perhaps they don't think that she means business, or maybe they don't care; either way, it is the interests of students that are being harmed.The United Federation of Teachers (UFT), the AFT affiliate that represents teachers in New York City, led the opposition to legislation favored by Gov. David A. Paterson (D) that would have lifted the state's cap on charter schools. Mr. Paterson, backed by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, had hoped to better position the state for up to $700 million in federal education dollars. The Obama administration has made clear that states that deny parents choice in where their children go to school by limiting the growth of these increasingly popular independent public schools will be penalized in the national competition for $4.35 billion in Race to the Top funds.
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y husband decided to send me a couple of links to various STEM articles which then led me to even more interesting links. If you are interested in this subject from a state and national level, here are some links. Happy reading!Apparently, Ohio is waaay ahead on this stuff so many of this articles are about different projects in that state.
- From Government Technology magazine, an article about a new STEM school in Ohio.
- From the University of Cincinnati (a key sponsor of a lot of these schools), an article about FUSION (Furthering Urban STEM Innovation, Outreach and New Research).
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So what should children be able to do by age 12, or the time they leave elementary school? They should be able to read a chapter book, write a story and a compelling essay; know how to add, subtract, divide and multiply numbers; detect patterns in complex phenomena; use evidence to support an opinion; be part of a group of people who are not their family; and engage in an exchange of ideas in conversation. If all elementary school students mastered these abilities, they would be prepared to learn almost anything in high school and college.Imagine, for instance, a third-grade classroom that was free of the laundry list of goals currently harnessing our teachers and students, and that was devoted instead to just a few narrowly defined and deeply focused goals.
In this classroom, children would spend two hours each day hearing stories read aloud, reading aloud themselves, telling stories to one another and reading on their own. After all, the first step to literacy is simply being immersed, through conversation and storytelling, in a reading environment; the second is to read a lot and often. A school day where every child is given ample opportunities to read and discuss books would give teachers more time to help those students who need more instruction in order to become good readers.
Children would also spend an hour a day writing things that have actual meaning to them -- stories, newspaper articles, captions for cartoons, letters to one another. People write best when they use writing to think and to communicate, rather than to get a good grade.
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The woman being tapped to run the Minneapolis School District will take part in four meetings this week to meet the community.Bernadeia Johnson has been an administrator in Minneapolis for a few years - most recently as deputy superintendent. These meetings will be the first time she faces the public as the only candidate for the top job after current superintendent Bill Green retires in June.
The school board announced earlier this month that Johnson was its only candidate for the job. She had long been considered a leading candidate, but the move still surprised some people for its suddenness. It means Minneapolis won't conduct a national search or even consider a list of a few semi-finalists, as St. Paul did last year.
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In the brave new world of data-driven education reform, most states have learned how to talk the talk. Start with "global competitiveness," add in some "longitudinal data" and "transparency," garnish with "accountability" and serve.But far fewer states are committed to more than the language of reform -- a reality made clear by the applications submitted last week to President Obama's Race to the Top grant program.
Race to the Top is the crown jewel of the Obama administration's education reform agenda and the largest-ever discretionary federal grant program for public schools. (In his State of the Union address this week, the president proposed adding an additional $1.4 billion to the pot of $4.35 billion.) The hope is that fiscally strapped states will make changes to ineffective policies and present comprehensive reform plans to be competitive for grants of up to $700 million. Indeed, Education Secretary Arne Duncan says that around a dozen states have changed laws or policies in response to the program thus far.
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Last Friday, NEA heralded the release of its annual Rankings & Estimates report by sending out a press release (embargoed until today) that claimed "inflation over the past decade has outpaced teachers' salaries in every single state across the country." This didn't sound right to researcher Jay P. Greene, so he scrutinized the report and couldn't find a single statistic to back up this claim. On the contrary, NEA's numbers revealed that teachers' salaries had increased 3.4 percent over the past decade, after adjusting for inflation.
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Ronnay Howard is 9 years old and legally blind with cornrows in her hair and a smile on her face.She sits in front of a keyboard in the resource room for the visually impaired at Engleburg Elementary School, her small hands moving methodically over six large keys.
She is writing in Braille, spelling out a single word - furious.
"I know I'm really good at it," she says.
This is how Braille is learned and how it is preserved, one student at a time, one word at a time.
Technology has been a great leveler, a blessing in this modern age for those with visual impairments. It has enabled tens of thousands of people to access written material quickly, to hear what they cannot see.
But there is an underside to the use of technology, to all the cassette tapes and digital recordings of everything from romance novels to textbooks to government forms.
It is called Braille illiteracy.
The National Federation of the Blind has been waging a campaign to ensure that those who are visually impaired learn how to read Braille.
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All the candidates for governor are being invited to share their education views with Get Schooled readers. As each piece comes in and is published here, it will be added to a category called Governor 2010. I urge you to read all the pieces.Here is what GOP candidate Jeff Chapman submitted:
By Jeff Chapman
It is a fact of life that today's children must have access to a first-rate education if they are to acquire the skills and knowledge needed to compete successfully in a modern, technological society.
It is also true that the quality of education in America, Georgia included, has, in too many cases, not kept pace with the demands of an increasingly complex world. High drop-out rates, low scores on achievement tests and poor classroom discipline are just some of the signs indicating that we must do better in preparing today's youth for success in college and the workforce.
What are some of the steps we could take to promote quality education and help ensure that every Georgia student has the opportunity to succeed?
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DAWN has just broken but classes have already started at the village school in Aqualaar, in the Garissa district of Kenya's arid north-east. Around 30 children, mostly from families of Somali herders, sit listening as an enthusiastic 18-year-old teacher, Ibrahim Hussein, gives an arithmetic lesson. The school is really little more than a sandy patch of ground under an acacia tree. Mr Hussein's blackboard hangs from its branches. There are no desks or chairs. Pupils follow the lesson by using sticks to scratch numbers in the sand.The lack of basic kit is only too typical of schools in poor countries. What is unusual, sadly, is that Mr Hussein was actually present and teaching when his school was visited by Kevin Watkins, the lead author of "Reaching the Marginalised", a new report on education in the developing world by UNESCO.
In India, for example, research by the World Bank reveals that 25% of teachers in government-run schools are away on any given day; of those present, only half were actually teaching when the bank's researchers made spot checks. That is dreadful but not unusual: teacher absenteeism rates are around 20% in rural Kenya, 27% in Uganda and 14% in Ecuador.
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Voters Tuesday will choose reform plans for 30 Los Angeles-area schools in an election like no other.For one thing, the voting age could dip to 14. Undocumented residents are welcome. Some people will get multiple votes. Ballot stuffing is expected.
And did we mention that each contestant will actually be competing in seven simultaneous elections? And that the results could be meaningless?
Whoever said democracy is messy could have been thinking of the Los Angeles Unified School District.
The subject of the election is singular: Groups inside and outside the school system are competing to run 12 persistently low-performing schools and 18 new campuses. The purpose of the balloting is for different voting blocs to select their favored bidder. Each bloc will be tallied separately, including parents, high school students and school employees.
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I enjoyed meeting and talking with Ellie Schatz recently. Listen to the conversation via this 17MB mp3 audio file CTRL-Click to download or read the transcript. Parent and activist Schatz founded WCATY and is, most recently author of "Grandma Says it's Good to Be Smart".
I enjoyed visiting with Ellie and found the conversation quite illuminating. Here's a useful segment from the 37 minute interview:
Jim: What's the best, most effective education model these days? Obviously, there are traditional schools. There are virtual schools. There are chartered schools. There are magnets. And then there's the complete open-enrollment thing. Milwaukee has it, where the kids can go wherever they want, public or private, and the taxes follow.Thanks to Rick Kiley for arranging this conversation.Ellie: [32:52] I think there's no one best model from the standpoint of those models that you just named. [32:59] What is important within any one of those models is that a key player in making that education available to your child believes that no matter how good the curriculum, no matter how good the model, the children they are about to serve are different, that children are not alike.
[33:30] And that they will have to make differences in the curriculum and in the way the learning takes place for different children.
[33:45] And I have experienced that myself. I've served on the boards of several private schools here in the city, and I have given that message: "This may be an excellent curriculum, and I believe it's an excellent curriculum. But that's not enough."
[34:05] You cannot just sit this curriculum down in front of every child in the classroom and say, "We're going to turn the pages at the same time, and we're going to write the answers in the same way." It does not work that way. You must believe in individually paced education.
[34:24] And that's why I say the WCATY model cannot change. If it's going to accomplish what I set out for WCATY to do, it must be accelerated from the nature of most of the curriculum that exists out there for kids today.
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Jacques Steinberg, via a kind reader's email:
p>Lisa Foderaro writes in The Times’s Metropolitan section that efforts by Princeton University to curb grade inflation are “now running into fierce resistance from the school's Type-A-plus student body.”The university had hoped that other institutions would follow its lead in making it harder for students to earn an A. “But the idea never took hold beyond Princeton's walls,” Ms. Foderaro writes, adding: “with the job market not what it once was, even for Ivy Leaguers, Princetonians are complaining that the campaign against bulked-up G.P.A.'s may be coming at their expense.”
How much tougher is it to earn an A at Princeton? The percentage of grades in the A range fell below40 percent last year, compared to nearly 50 percent in 2004, when the policy was adopted.
In nearly 100 comments and counting, reader response on the issue of grade inflation has been fierce. For a sense of how one important arbiter -- Yale Law School -- interprets undergraduate grades, I draw your attention to this comment, from Asha Rangappa, the dean of Yale Law (and a Princeton graduate.) -- Jacques
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Virtual schooling can be an educational choice with particular benefits for some students with disabilities. The recent study "Serving Students with Disabilities in State-level Virtual K-12 Public School Programs" by Eve Müller, Ph.D., published in September 2009 by the National Association of State Directors of Special Education (NASDSE)'s Project Forum, and funded by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Special Education Programs, surveyed state education agencies nationwide regarding their virtual K-12 public school programs:
Eleven states described one or more benefits associated with serving students with disabilities in virtual K-12 public school programs. These include:
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Governor Tom Kean & Governor Brendan Byrne:
Q: The governor's advisory panels made a number of recommendations, including a possible freeze on the salaries of teachers and other public employees. Given that contracts are involved, could this be done?BYRNE: We have to get over this attitude of "not on my back." We have to get it across that everybody has to make sacrifices in order to make this work. It's not going to if all hell breaks loose every time you try to eliminate one fireman. It's not going to be easy.
KEAN: I don't think people yet have an understanding of how bad things are.Comprehending a $10 billion-$12 billion deficit in a $30 billion budget is difficult, if not impossible. Everybody is going to be making sacrifices, not just scattered employees.
BYRNE: It's nice being in Washington for a day, where the talk is in trillions.Q: Politically speaking, is taking on the teachers and state employees a fight worth considering simply because of the message it sends?
KEAN: We haven't any choice. We have wonderful public employees, but they get paid more than anybody in the country in similar positions. We simply can't afford to do that anymore.
BYRNE: People think this is a minor problem, and it isn't.
KEAN: In previous years, governors and legislators have been able to paper over the problem. They've done so irresponsibly, by increasing debt to much more than it ought to be. Now this is coming home to roost, and we've all got to deal with it.
BYRNE: And that will include cutting things that are dear to our hearts, and that's tough.
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IN CALIFORNIA the students are revolting--not against their teachers, but in sympathy with them. The state's governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has cut $1 billion, some 20% of the University of California's budget, as he tries to balance the state's books. Fees may rise by a fifth, to over $10,000. Support staff are being fired; academics must take unpaid leave.That is part of a global picture in which cash-strapped governments in the rich world are scrutinising the nearly 5% of GDP they devote to education. Those budgets may not be the top candidates for the chop, but they cannot fully escape it.
Just before Christmas the British government said it planned to reduce spending on higher education, science and research by £600m ($980m) by 2012-13, just as a chilly job market is sending students scurrying to do more and longer courses. The trade union that represents academic staff claims that up to 30 universities could close with the loss of 14,000 jobs. A House of Commons select committee is investigating the effects on British science.
Even where education spending has not been slashed, it may face a squeeze as short-term stimulus spending ends. America's $787 billion Recovery Act passed by Congress nearly a year ago included $100 billion for education. More than half is to be spent this year, meaning that the budget will have to be cut in 2011. A study by the Centre for the Study of Education Policy at Illinois State University, published on January 18th, found that half of American states will have spent all of their stimulus money for education by the end of July. Cuts will follow. Privately funded schools and colleges have seen their endowments and donors' enthusiasm wither.
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The state's budget mess is a ticking time bomb and now Illinois residents can watch as it explodes.A Web site launched by the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago displays a ticker that counts up Illinois' debt. On Friday evening, the number was around $128,586,300,000 and swiftly on the rise.
The Web site IllinoisIsBroke.com keeps track of the state's growing deficit.The civic committee isn't in the business of political endorsements, so don't ask them who those candidates are. However, President Eden Martin said he hopes voters take a better look at the individuals running for office.
"If there's a kind of public irritation that becomes strong enough, I think there would be enough support for fundamental reforms," Martin said.
Martin blamed changes to the pension system in 1995 that put Illinois on a path toward bankruptcy. To fix the problem, the committee proposes the state reform pensions so they are comparable to the private sector, meaning fewer benefits, a later retirement age and a less generous cost-of-living adjustment.
But Martin knows that's no easy task and understands why some politicians prefer the status quo.
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The Obama administration is proposing a sweeping overhaul of President Bush's signature education law, No Child Left Behind, and will call for broad changes in how schools are judged to be succeeding or failing, as well as for the elimination of the law's 2014 deadline for bringing every American child to academic proficiency.Educators who have been briefed by administration officials said the proposals for changes in the main law governing the federal role in public schools would eliminate or rework many of the provisions that teachers' unions, associations of principals, school boards and other groups have found most objectionable.
Yet the administration is not planning to abandon the law's commitments to closing the achievement gap between minority and white students and to encouraging teacher quality.
Significantly, said those who have been briefed, the White House wants to change federal financing formulas so that a portion of the money is awarded based on academic progress, rather than by formulas that apportion money to districts according to their numbers of students, especially poor students. The well-worn formulas for distributing tens of billions of dollars in federal aid have, for decades, been a mainstay of the annual budgeting process in the nation's 14,000 school districts.
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The housing boom has left the sprawling school district based in this former rail town on the Little Miami River with gleaming new buildings and a dilemma over how to keep them funded.Three times in the past 15 months, voters have rejected levies that would have kept the Little Miami School District in the black. Each time, the district fell further behind and had to ask for more. On Tuesday, voters will face the biggest request yet--a new real-estate tax that amounts to $519 per $100,000 of assessed value, nearly twice the rate rejected in November.
Backers say the levy, combined with already deep cuts, is the only way to prevent a fiscal emergency that would force a state takeover of the schools. "It's the downturn of an entire community. People are going to start looking at moving and your property value is going to go through the floor," said Julie Salmons Perelman, a 44-year-old part-time veterinary technician with three children in the schools, who sat stuffing bags filled with campaign literature one morning last week.
Bill Nicholson, 54, a longtime opponent of the levies, calls the rising requests in the face of repeated rejections "insanity." In the past, he has argued on behalf of people with fixed incomes, but he recently lost his own job as a consultant in the perfume industry. "How can I cut a budget of zero" to pay more taxes, he asked.
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A number of years ago, curious about the ownership of student work produced in a class, I asked a lawyer friend who specializes in art and design copyright law if schools had the right to reproduce student work in their recruitment publicity without the students' permission. He informed me that the student, despite advice from faculty who may have shaped the work, owns the work and that written permission must be secured before it could be reproduced. He also said such works could be considered student records and recruitment results in some benefit to the institution that exceeds any reading of the "fair use" practices of educational institutions (i.e. those that might be applied to the use of lecture slides for a class).This reading of the law is at odds with the prevailing opinion of many schools that the student would not have produced work of a particular quality under his or her own resources, and therefore, that faculty have some "ownership rights" in the output of any class. Since that time I have been very careful to ask students first about any public use of their work, even in lectures I give at other schools, and I always credit the work with their names and give students the details on the presentation venues for their resumes. My lawyer friend told me that statements in college catalogs claiming that the institution retains ownership of work produced in a class wouldn't hold up in court; unless the maker is an employee of the institution/company or has signed away rights through some explicit agreement, ownership is retained by the maker. Other attorneys may have different interpretations, and I don't profess to be a legal expert, but the ownership of work produced by students is certainly something to think about.
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Abstinence-only education has been a frequent point of contention between conservatives and liberals.Conservatives, particularly religious ones, have argued that young people need to be taught the moral dimension of sexual activity as part of abstinence education and urged to avoid sex until marriage.
For those reasons, liberals and many health and education professionals have argued against abstinence-only education. Many of them have preferred comprehensive sex education.
Now a new study indicates that abstinence-only education works even when it doesn't have a moral component.
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President Barack Obama's 2011 budget proposes to boost education spending 9% to advance its overhaul of federal school-funding policy that has emerged as a rare patch of common ground for the administration and some Republicans.At the same time, Mr. Obama is using his 2011 Education Department budget proposal to signal plans to revamp the Bush Administration's No Child Left Behind policies, which have stirred opposition from some teachers and school administrators. Mr. Obama states his intention to scrap the Bush-era accountability standards for a new system to be negotiated with Congress. Administration officials say that talks with Congress on how to revamp the No Child law remain preliminary.
Most of the additional $4.5 billion in spending proposed for the Education Department is slated to fund competitive programs, making the budget a key part of an administration bid to transform how local school officials interact with the federal government.
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On the second page of the Post's Metro section, and on this Web site, you see the results of the 12th annual Washington Post survey of high school student participation in college-level tests, what I call the Challenge Index.The ranked list of public schools -- both the Washington area version in the Post and the national version in Newsweek each June -- gets lots of attention, but the outrage and acclaim usually swirls around the issue of whether ranking schools is good for you. With much support from Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate teachers around the country, I think it is. But how can you use it?
I invented the list to show that some schools in good neighborhoods don't deserve their great reputations, and some schools in poor neighborhoods don't deserve their terrible ones. Opening up AP and IB courses to everyone who wants to work hard -- the philosophy of the teachers who inspired me to do this -- is a relatively new idea. Ten years ago, most schools in the United States did not let students take these courses unless they had strong grade point averages or teachers' recommendations.
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My column last week about how to reveal the secrets of which teacher is getting the best Advanced Placement results received many more comments than I expected. This was, I thought, a topic only for insiders, AP obsessives like me. I forgot, once again, that college-level exams have become a rite of passage for at least a third of American high schoolers, with that proportion increasing every year.The column provided links to the several local school districts that have posted the subject-by-subject AP results for each school. I was shocked that any were doing it, since five years ago when I asked about this, few school officials had given it much thought. Since the AP tests are written and graded by outside experts, a teacher who does not challenge his students in class is likely to have lots of low scores on that school report, which until now hardly anyone had a chance to see.
Many thought I glossed over the effects of opening up AP courses to anyone who wants to get a useful taste of college trauma, sort of like camping in the back yard before your dad takes you to the Sierras. Enough mediocre students have enrolled in AP, and a similar program International Baccalaureate, to lower average scores even in the classes of the best teachers.
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Why is a child born in northwest Los Angeles four times as likely to be diagnosed with autism as a child born elsewhere in California?Medical experts have pondered for years why autism rates have soared nationwide, and why the disorder appears to be much more prevalent in certain communities than in others. Now, some recent studies that zero in on California may shed some light on these baffling questions.
A new autism study shows clusters of high autism rates in parts of California. WSJ's health columnist Melinda Beck joins Simon Constable on the News Hub with more.
Researchers from Columbia University, in a study published in the current Journal of Health & Place, identified an area including West Hollywood, Beverly Hills and some less posh neighborhoods that accounted for 3% of the state's new cases of autism every year from 1993 to 2001, even though it had only 1% of the population.
Another recent study, from the University of California, Davis, published in Autism Research, also found high rates of autism in children born around Los Angeles, as well as nine other California locations. Autism, usually diagnosed before a child is 3 years old, is a developmental disorder characterized by impaired social interaction and communication and repetitive behavior.
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You're invited to spend a fun and lively evening at Broadway West --
the Friends of West High Drama's largest fundraiser and social event of the year!
Saturday, February 6, 2010 • 7-10 pm
Alumni Lounge in the UW's Pyle Center (next to the Red Gym at 702 Langdon Street)*
$30 for one adult • $50 for two adults • $10 per West High student
Tickets will be available at the door, but advance reservations are greatly appreciated
• Enjoy a variety of fabulous theatrical and musical performances,
along with art exhibitions, by some of West's highly talented students
• Eat, drink, and be merry with other West parents, theater friends, and students
• Hors d'oeuvres, desserts, and a cash bar will be available,
with both alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages
• Bid on great live-auction items, auctioned by the always-hilarious Tom Farley
• Relax in our casual, but festive lakefront venue, with its 270-degree view of Lake Mendota
HOW CAN YOU HELP?
• If you'd like to make a last-minute donation of a fabulous live-auction item, please contact us at friendsofwestdrama@yahoo.com. All donors will be recognized at the event and acknowledged in writing. We can assist with a pick-up if needed.
• Reserve your tickets to attend Broadway West: $30 for one adult; $50 for two adults; and $10 per West High student. If time permits, fill out the form below and mail it back to us. Or just show up! You can purchase tickets for the same price at the door.
• Make an online donation: If you cannot attend, but would like to support West drama in your absence, consider making a contribution using the form below or online through the Foundation for Madison's Public Schools at https://fmps.org/donate.asp?pt=drama
Thank you for your support -- this will undoubtedly be an evening to remember!
Questions? Contact us at friendsofwestdrama@yahoo.com.
*Parking is available on Lake and Langdon Streets, in the Memorial Union surface lot, and in the Helen C. White, Lake Street, and Lucky Building ramps.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - CUT HERE - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Make checks payable to FMPS-Friends of West High Drama. Complete and return this section with your payment to: Marcia Gevelinger Bastian, 4210 Mandan Crescent, Madison, WI 53711. Pre-paid tickets will be ready for you at the door of the event. If time does not permit an advance ticket purchase, just show up! You can buy tickets for the same price at the door.
_____ Yes! I'd like to reserve adult tickets: _____ one at $30, or _____ two at $50 = (total) $ _____
($20 of each $30 ticket is tax deductible.)
_____ Yes! I'd like to reserve West student tickets: (number) _____ at $10 each = (total) $ _____
(Student performers get in free.)
_____ I enclose a tax-deductible contribution in the amount of $ _____
(You can also donate online through the Foundation for Madison's Public Schools at https://fmps.org/donate.asp?pt=drama)
_____ Yes! I'd like to donate a live-auction item. I'm contacting FWHD at friendsofwestdrama@yahoo.com to discuss it and to arrange a pick-up if needed.
Name(s): _______________________________________________________________________________
Address, City, State, Zip: _________________________________________________________________
E-mail: ________________________________________________________________________________
Phone (in case we have questions): _________________________________________________________
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Nokia and education company Pearson have formed a joint venture in China dubbed Beijing Mobiledu Technologies to grow MobilEdu, the wireless education service that the Finnish mobile giant launched in China back in 2007.There are many ways to learn, not all of them require traditional methods or expensive "professional development".Mobiledu is a mobile service that essentially provides English-language learning materials and other educational content, from a variety of content providers, directly to mobile phones.
Customers can access the content through an application preloaded on new Nokia handsets, or by visiting the service's mobile website and most other WAP portals in China.
According to Nokia, Mobiledu has attracted 20 million subscribers in China so far, with 1.5 million people actively using the service each month. According to the press release and by mouth of John Fallon, Chief Executive of Pearson's International Education business, China is the world's largest mobile phone market and the country with the largest number of people learning English.
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via a kind reader. Math 627K PDF:
This document provides grade level standards for mathematics in grades K-8, and high school standards organized under the headings of the College and Career Readiness Standards in Mathematics. Students reaching the readiness level described in that document (adjusted in response to feedback) will be prepared for non-remedial college mathematics courses and for training programs for career-level jobs. Recognizing that most students and parents have higher aspirations, and that ready for college is not the same as ready for mathematics-intensive majors and careers, we have included in this document standards going beyond the readiness level. Most students will cover these additional standards. Students who want the option of entering STEM fields will reach the readiness level by grade 10 or 11 and take precalculus or calculus before graduating from high school. Other students will go beyond readiness through statistics to college. Other pathways can be designed and available as long as they include the readiness level. The final draft of the K-12 standards will indicate which concepts and skills are needed to reach the readiness level and which go beyond. We welcome feedback from states on where that line should be drawn.English Language Arts 3.6MB PDFEnglish Language Learners in Mathematics Classrooms
English language learners (ELLs) must be held to the same high standards expected of students who are already proficient in English. However, because these students are acquiring English language proficiency and content area knowledge concurrently, some students will require additional time and all will require appropriate instructional support and aligned assessments.ELLs are a heterogeneous group with differences in ethnic background, first language, socio-economic status, quality of prior schooling, and levels of English language proficiency. Effectively educating these students requires adjusting instruction and assessment in ways that consider these factors. For example ELLs who are literate in a first language that shares cognates with English can apply first-language vocabulary knowledge when reading in English; likewise ELLs with high levels of schooling can bring to bear conceptual knowledge developed in their first language when reading in a second language. On the other hand, ELLs with limited or interrupted schooling will need to acquire background knowledge prerequisite to educational tasks at hand. As they become acculturated to US schools, ELLs who are newcomers will need sufficiently scaffolded instruction and assessments to make sense of content delivered in a second language and display this content knowledge.
A draft of grade-by-grade common standards is undergoing significant revisions in response to feedback that the outline of what students should master is confusing and insufficiently user-friendly.Writing groups convened by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association are at work on what they say will be a leaner, better-organized, and easier-to-understand version than the 200-plus-page set that has been circulating among governors, scholars, education groups, teams of state education officials, and others for review in recent weeks. The first public draft of the standards, which was originally intended for a December release but was postponed until January, is now expected by mid-February.
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Kurt Kiefer:
Attached are the most recent results from our MMSD value added analysis project, and effort in which we are collaborating with the Wisconsin center for Educational Research Value Added Research Center (WCERVARC). These data include the two-year models for both the 2006-2008 and 2005-2007 school year spans.Much more on the Madison School District's Value Added Assessment program here. The "value added assessment" data is based on Wisconsin's oft-criticized WKCE.This allows us in a single report to view value added performance for consecutive intervals of time and thereby begin to identify trends. Obviously, it is a trend pattern that will provide the greatest insights into best practices in our schools.
As it relates to results, there do seem to be some patterns emerging among elementary schools especially in regard to mathematics. As for middle schools, the variation across schools is once again - as it was last year with the first set of value added results - remarkably narrow, i.e., schools perform very similar to each other, statistically speaking.
Also included in this report are attachments that show the type of information used with our school principals and staff in their professional development sessions focused on how to interpret and use the data meaningfully. The feedback from the sessions has been very positive.
Table E1 presents value added at the school level for 28 elementary schools in Madison Metropolitan School District. Values added are presented for two overlapping time periods; the period between the November 2005 to November 2007 WKCE administrations, and the more recent period between the November 2006 and November 2008 WKCE. This presents value added as a two-year moving average to increase precision and avoid overinterpretation of trends. Value added is measured in reading and math.
VA is equal to the school's value added. It is equal to the number ofextra points students at a school scored on the WKCE relative to observationally similar students across the district A school with a zero value added is an average school in terms of value added. Students at a school with a value added of 3 scored 3 points higher on the WKCE on average than observationally similar students at other schools.
Std. Err. is the standard error ofthe school's value added. Because schools have only a finite number of students, value added (and any other school-level statistic) is measured with some error. Although it is impossible to ascertain the sign of measurement error, we can measure its likely magnitude by using its standard error. This makes it possible to create a plausible range for a school's true value added. In particular, a school's measured value added plus or minus 1.96 standard errors provides a 95 percent confidence interval for a school's true value added.
N is the number of students used to measure value added. It covers students whose WKCE scores can be matched from one year to the next.
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So should we, as Paul Krugman suggests, spend another trillion in stimulus if it helps growth? No, because, as I have written for a very long time, and will focus on in future weeks, increased deficits and rising debt-to-GDP is a long-term losing proposition. It simply puts off what will be a reckoning that will be even worse, with yet higher debt levels. You cannot borrow your way out of a debt crisis.This Time Is Different
While I was in Europe, and flying back, I had the great pleasure of reading This Time is Different, by Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, on my new Kindle, courtesy of Fred Fern.I am going to be writing about and quoting from this book for several weeks. It is a very important work, as it gives us the first really comprehensive analysis of financial crises. I highlighted more pages than in any book in recent memory (easy to do on the Kindle, and even easier to find the highlights). Rather than offering up theories on how to deal with the current financial crisis, the authors show us what happened in over 250 historical crises in 66 countries. And they offer some very clear ideas on how this current crisis might play out. Sadly, the lesson is not a happy one. There are no good endings once you start down a deleveraging path. As I have been writing for several years, we now are faced with choosing from among several bad choices, some being worse than others. This Time is Different offers up some ideas as to which are the worst choices.
If you are a serious student of economics, you should read this book. If you want to get a sense of the problems we face, the authors conveniently summarize the situation in chapters 13-16, purposefully allowing people to get the main points without drilling into the mountain of details they provide. Get the book at a 45% discount at Amazon.com.
Buy it with the excellent book I am now reading, Wall Street Revalued, and get free shipping.
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Kurt Kiefer & Lisa Wachtel [1.4MB PDF]:
This report summarizes data on the use of Infinite Campus teacher tools and the Parent and Student Portal. Data come from a survey conducted among all teachers responsible for students within the Infinite Campus system and an analysis of the Infinite Campus data base. Below are highlights from the report.Much more on Infinite Campus and the Madison School District here.Follow up is planned during January 2010 with staff on how we can address some of the issues related to enhancing the use olthese tools among staff, parents, and stUdents. This report is scheduled to be provided to the Board of Education in February 2010.
- About half of all middle and high school teachers responsible for providing grades to students are using the grade book tool.
- Grade book use has declined over the past year at the middle school level due to the introduction of standards- based grading. In addition to the change in grading approach, the grade book tool in Infinite Campus does not handle standards-based grading as efficiently as traditional grading.
- Lesson Planner and Grade book use is most common among World Languages, Physical Education, and Science teachers and less common among fine arts and language arts/reading teachers.
- Grade book and other tool use is most common among teachers with less than three years of teaching experience.
- Seventy percent of teachers responding to the survey within these years of experience category report using the tools compared with about half of all other experience categories.
- Most of the other teacher tools within Infinite Campus, e.g., Messenger, Newsletters, reports, etc., are not being used due to a lack o!familiarity with them.
- Many teachers expressed interest in learning about how they can use other digital tools such as the Moodie leaming management system, blogs, wikis, and Drupal web pages.
- About one third of parents with high school stUdents use the Infinite Campus Parent Portal. Slightly less than 30 percent of parents of middle school students use the Portal. Having just been introduced to elementary schools this fall, slightly more that ten percent of parents of students at this level use the Portal.
- Parents of white students are more likely to use the Portal than are parents of students within other racial/ethnic subgroups.
- About half of all high school students have used the Portal at one time this school year. About one in five middle school students have used the Portal this year.
- Variation in student portal use is wide across the middle and high schools.
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Superintendent Dan Nerad 80K PDF.:
In November of 2008 the district was given voter approval for a three year operating referendum: $5 million in 2009-2010, $4 million in 2010-2011, and $4 million in 2011-2012. The approved operating referendum has a shared cost plan between property tax payers and the district.Related:During the fall adoption of the 2009-2010 budget the Board of Education worked to reduce the impact for property tax payers by eliminating costs and utilizing fund balance. The State 2009- 2011 budget impacted the district funding significantly in the fall of 2009-2010 and will again have an impact on the 2010-2011 projections.
The district and PMA Financial Network, Inc., worked to prepare a financial forecast for 2010- 2011.
The $3.8 trillion budget blueprint President Obama plans to submit to Congress on Monday calls for billions of dollars in new spending to combat persistently high unemployment and bolster a battered middle class. But it also would slash funding for hundreds of programs and raise taxes on banks and the wealthy to help rein in soaring budget deficits, according to congressional sources and others with knowledge of the document.To put people back to work, Obama proposes to spend about $100 billion immediately on a jobs bill that would include tax cuts for small businesses, social safety net programs and aid to state and local governments. To reduce deficits, he would impose new fees on some of the nation's largest banks and permit a range of tax cuts to expire for families earning more than $250,000 a year, in addition to freezing non-security spending for three years.
Despite those efforts, the White House expects the annual gap between spending and revenue to approach a record $1.6 trillion this year as the government continues to dig out from the worst recession in more than a generation, according to congressional sources. The red ink would recede to $1.3 trillion in 2011, but remain persistently high for years to come under Obama's policies.
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British education may be down in the dumps over government spending prospects, but in the US the picture is rather different.This week President Barack Obama announced a big cash boost for schools and for university students.
In his state of the union address, President Obama announced a $4bn (£2.5bn) increase in federal spending on elementary and secondary schools.
That is a rise of over six per cent, one of the biggest rises for years.
He also announced an even bigger cash increase in student aid to provide more federal grants for poor students and to ease the impact of student debt repayment.
In future, graduates in the US will be "forgiven" their outstanding federal loan debt after 20 years or, if they enter public service, after 10 years.
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