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When Mio Honzawa starts fifth grade next April, her textbooks will be thicker.Alarmed that its children are falling behind those in rivals such as South Korea and Hong Kong, Japan is adding about 1,200 pages to elementary school textbooks. The textbooks across all subjects for six years of elementary school now total about 4,900 pages, and will go up to nearly 6,100.
In a move that has divided educators and experts, Japan is going back to basics after a 10-year experiment in "pressure-free education," which encouraged more application of knowledge and less rote memorization.
"I think it's a good move. Compared to the education I got, I'm kind of shocked at the level my children are receiving," said Keiko Honzawa, a Tokyo resident and mother of Mio and her seventh-grade brother.
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"This has become known as the iPad class," Corey Angst, assistant professor of management at the University of Notre Dame, told his students on their first day of class Aug. 24. "It's actually not...it's 'Project Management.'"A member of Notre Dame's ePublishing Working Group, Angst is debuting the University's first and only class taught using Apple's new wireless tablet computer to replace traditional textbooks. The course is part of a unique, year-long Notre Dame study of eReaders, and Angst is conducting the first phase using iPads, which just went on sale to the public in April.
"One unique thing we are doing is conducting research on the iPad," Angst says. "We want to know whether students feel the iPads are useful and how they plan to use them. I want them to tell me, 'I found this great app that does such and such. I want this to be organic...We have an online Wiki discussion group where students can share their ideas."
The working group participants are from a broad array of colleges and departments, including the Mendoza College of Business, Notre Dame Law School, College of Arts and Letters, First Year of Studies, Hesburgh Libraries, Office of Information Technologies, Hammes Notre Dame Bookstore, Office of Sustainability, Notre Dame Press and Office of Institutional Equity.
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Marty Walz & Will Browsnberger:
THIS WEEK marks the start of the school year. Unfortunately, Massachusetts students are returning to classrooms that haven't changed much since their parents and grandparents attended. Meanwhile, students in other states are taking advantage of a learning opportunity that students here are denied -- online education.Massachusetts should be in the forefront of using computers and the Internet to change where, when, and how students learn. We have the expertise to lead in virtual education, but the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education has restricted school district efforts to introduce virtual schools.
The education reform act approved by the Legislature in January makes it easy for districts to create virtual schools. Of course, we don't envision a future in which online learning replaces brick-and-mortar public schools. Face-to-face peer contact and personal teacher mentoring will always be an important part of learning, especially at the lower grades. However, an increasing portion of learning can occur online with the support of peers and with less direct supervision by teachers. In the long run, this may be the only way to significantly expand learning time within the state's economic constraints.
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Robert J. Samuelson, the Newsweek and Washington Post economics columnist, edited my first news story. We were both college sophomores. I was trying out for the student newspaper. He was already a seasoned reporter and editor on the staff. He tossed the typewritten sheets back to me and said to try again.I did as I was told. I learned much from him during that first encounter, as I have continued to do during our long friendship. He enlightens me even on topics in my specialty, such as his latest column in the Post, "The failure of school reform."
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FROM "Wikinomics" to "Cognitive Surplus" to "Crowdsourcing", there is no shortage of books lauding the "Web 2.0" era and celebrating the online collaboration, interaction and sharing that it makes possible. Today anyone can publish a blog or put a video on YouTube, and thousands of online volunteers can collectively produce an operating system like Linux or an encyclopedia like Wikipedia. Isn't that great?No, says Jaron Lanier, a technologist, musician and polymath who is best known for his pioneering work in the field of virtual reality. His book, "You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto", published earlier this year, is a provocative attack on many of the internet's sacred cows. Mr Lanier lays into the Web 2.0 culture, arguing that what passes for creativity today is really just endlessly rehashed content and that the "fake friendship" of social networks "is just bait laid by the lords of the clouds to lure hypothetical advertisers". For Mr Lanier there is no wisdom of crowds, only a cruel mob. "Anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks and lightweight mash-ups may seem trivial and harmless," he writes, "but as a whole, this widespread practice of fragmentary, impersonal communication has demeaned personal interaction."
If this criticism of Google, Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia had come from an outsider--a dyed-in-the-wool technophobe--then nobody would have paid much attention. But Mr Lanier's denunciation of internet groupthink as "digital Maoism" carries more weight because of his career at technology's cutting edge.
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For instance, instead of sticking to one study location, simply alternating the room where a person studies improves retention. So does studying distinct but related skills or concepts in one sitting, rather than focusing intensely on a single thing."We have known these principles for some time, and it's intriguing that schools don't pick them up, or that people don't learn them by trial and error," said Robert A. Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. "Instead, we walk around with all sorts of unexamined beliefs about what works that are mistaken."
Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are "visual learners" and others are auditory; some are "left-brain" students, others "right-brain." In a recent review of the relevant research, published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a team of psychologists found almost zero support for such ideas. "The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing," the researchers concluded.
Ditto for teaching styles, researchers say. Some excellent instructors caper in front of the blackboard like summer-theater Falstaffs; others are reserved to the point of shyness. "We have yet to identify the common threads between teachers who create a constructive learning atmosphere," said Daniel T. Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia and author of the book "Why Don't Students Like School?"
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Yet in Newark's public schools, as in many other urban districts, our children's endless talent meets headfirst with a stultifying bureaucracy that too often extinguishes rather than ignites their genius. It is beset with rules that ignore the individual talents of school leaders and teachers.Clusty Search: Shavar Jeffries.Its primary features -- tenure, lockstep pay, and seniority -- deny the complexity and creativity of effective teaching and learning, implying that teachers and principals are little more than interchangeable assemblyline workers. These practices instill performance-blindness into the fabric of our schools, dishonoring the talent, commitment and effort of our many good teachers and principals, whose excellence is systematically unrecognized and thus underappreciated. This both disrespects the notion of education as a sophisticated profession and produces a system in which student achievement is peripheral to the day-to-day operations of schools.
Simply put, our children have no limits; our schools have too many.
The future for our children depends on revolutionary school reform, executed relentlessly. Our children can no longer afford tinkering around the edges. This reform must include at least four elements:
•Reform of tenure and collective bargaining, including eliminating tenure for principals and significantly restricting it for teachers.
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Efforts to improve education in the U.S. has included financial incentives for high-performing teachers and programs have targeted middle- and high-school students, but a recent study found success in giving money to kids as young as third grade who scored well on standardized tests.In a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research titled "Paying to Learn: The Effect of Financial Incentives on Elementary School Test Scores" Eric P. Bettinger of the Stanford School of Education looks at a program in the poor, Appalachian community of Coshocton, Ohio.
The pay-for-performance plan targeted third through sixth graders who took standardized tests in math, reading, writing, science, and social studies. The students could earn up to $100 -- $20 per score of Advanced in each test. Students who scored proficient were awarded $15 per test. In order to make sure the proceeds went directly to the students, payment was made in "Coshocton Children's Bucks," which could only be redeemed by kids for children's items. Participation in the program was randomized based on a lottery as specified by Robert Simpson, a local factory owner, who financed the effort.
The program showed generally positive results, with the biggest gains coming in math. Students who were eligible for the payments improved about 0.15 standard deviations, a statistically significant result. Though there were small improvements shown for other subject areas, the difference wasn't statistically significant.
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I've been giving thought to the School Board elections next year. I might run. I say that not for anyone to comment on but because I'm musing out loud on it. There are many reasons NOT to run but I have one main reason TO run.Locally, the April, 2011 school board election features two seats, currently occupied by Ed Hughes and Marj Passman.Accountability.
To this day, I am mystified over the number of people who run for office that don't believe they have to explain anything to voters AFTER they are elected. And I'm talking here about people whose work is not done with a vote (like the Mayor) but people who have to work in a group (City Council, School Board).
I truly doubt that these people get challenged on every single vote but I'm sure people ask on some. Why would they not respond? If asked, what data or information did you use to make this decision, why can't they answer in specific? Why wouldn't you be accountable to explain how you came to your decision?
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Fears that the Government's "free" schools programme will be dominated by faith groups and create more segregation between religions were re-ignited yesterday. Five of the first 16 schools announced by Education Secretary Michael Gove will be faith-orientated - two Jewish, one Hindu, one Sikh and one Christian.In two other cases, organisers say there will be a strong Christian influence but the school will not officially be a faith school. Two of the projects are proposed by the education charity ARK, which was set up by the hedge fund millionaire Arpad Busson. The author Toby Young was also given the green light for his proposal for a secondary school in Acton, west London, which will concentrate on the classics - every child will be expected to learn Latin at least up to GCSE level.
Under the Government's plans, parents, teachers, charities and faith groups are being encouraged to put in bids to run their own schools with state financial support. They will be able to determine their own curriculum and be free of local authority controls, but the British Humanist Association warned yesterday that they would also be free to promote religious intolerance.
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When the Michigan Department of Education classified 41 schools in the Detroit Public Schools system as "failing" last month, I braced myself for a thunderous public outcry.After all, it was only a few weeks ago that a very energized group descended on the Detroit City Council to loudly and angrily express themselves about education in Detroit. Surely these concerned citizens, having just voiced such a strong concern about education, would leap to action to demand that something be done to fix these "failing" schools now.
But that hasn't happened. The silence, as the old cliché goes, has been deafening.
Why would people who were so passionate and loud so recently remain silent about a report that shows our children are being severely shortchanged? Why would members of the school board who fought to preserve the status quo remain equally silent about such a devastating report?After all, nothing is as important to our children's future as education. And nothing is more important to our future as a city than our young people.
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This is an encouraging season for education reform, and the latest development is a bipartisan political breakout on vouchers in the unlikely state of Pennsylvania.Last month, and to widespread surprise, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Dan Onorato came out in support of school vouchers for underprivileged kids. Mr. Onorato said that education "grants"--he avoided the term vouchers--"would give low-income families in academically distressed communities direct choices about which schools their children should attend."
Mr. Onorato's Republican opponent, state Attorney General Tom Corbett, is also a strong backer of education choice, which means that come November Pennsylvania voters will get to choose between two candidates who are on record in support of a statewide school voucher program.
Mr. Onorato, the Allegheny County Executive, adopted his new position at the urging of state lawmaker Tony Williams, a voucher proponent whom he defeated in a May primary. The speculation is that Mr. Onorato, who trails Mr. Corbett in the polls, is looking to attract financial support from pro-voucher businessmen who backed Mr. Williams in the primary.
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The lawn is meticulously manicured, as if the groundskeeper's tools include a cuticle scissors. Classic brick buildings, a bell tolling the hour and concrete lion statues almost convince me that I'm at an East Coast college. But this is Lakeside School in Northeast Seattle.This is where super-achievers went to school - Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Craig McCaw to name a few. Many of Seattle's affluent families send their kids here for a challenging private education. With an acceptance rate of 24 percent, Lakeside is the most elite private high school in the Northwest. This photo of Bliss Hall was taken before the current renovation project started.
So what was I doing there? Just wandering, and wondering if my children would have a better start in life if they went to private schools.
"As someone who has experienced both public schooling and private schooling, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind: sending your child to a private school is one of the best decisions you can make for him or her," says Peter Rasmussen, a recent Lakeside alumnus. "In retrospect, if my parents made me pay my tuition all by myself, I would have. That's how valuable a Lakeside education is."
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Steven Snead, via a kind reader
Recall now the biblical phrase, "from whence comes my help?" It mentions looking up to the hills and Detroiters are doing just that.Clusty Search: Steven Snead.They are looking to the Hills of Bloomfield, Auburn Hills, and Rochester Hills. They are looking to the rich green lawns of Troy, Sterling Heights, Farmington, and Gross Pointe. And yes, they are looking to their excellent schools too.
I have no doubt that this mother's prayers have been duplicated by thousands of Detroit parents. The results of the 2010 census will no doubt show that minority populations have increased in suburban cities and overall population in Detroit will yet again hit an all time low. So while they desperately scramble to enroll their children in charter schools and suburban schools of choice, parents still have their compass set due north. Way north.
This is the New Black Migration. And if school leaders cannot devise a way to make the city schools a viable option for parents who want the best for their children, it will be a migration whose tide will know no end.
Related: Madison Preparatory Academy.
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The Los Angeles Times last week did what few, if any, school districts are willing to do -- analyze teacher performance over multiple years with the intent of making the results of that analysis available to teachers and parents, alike. Teacher union representatives have been quick to condemn the newspaper's plans to post this information online in a searchable database. But U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and no few teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District saw merit in the project, as do we.Public education can benefit from more transparency. The disclosure of data on student achievement and teacher effectiveness can be a good thing -- for teachers, parents and American education.
"Too often our systems keep all of our teachers in the dark about the quality of their own work," Duncan told an audience in Little Rock, Ark. "In other fields, we talk about success constantly, with statistics and other measures to prove it. Why, in education, are we scared to talk about what success looks like?"
It seems a great many teachers have no such fear. Duncan noted that more than 2,000 Los Angeles teachers had called the Times last week to ask for their scores.
The concern has always been that achievement tests are not a reliable or complete measure of teacher eectiveness. It's a valid concern. Certainly, test scores are not a complete measure, and should never be used as such in decisions on hiring, firing or career advancement. Whether or not test scores can be a reliable, or fair, measure depends on how thorough and careful the analysis.
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When Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was sworn in as Brazil's president in early 2003, he emotionally declared that he had finally earned his "first diploma" by becoming president of the country.One of Brazil's least educated presidents -- Mr. da Silva completed only the fourth grade -- soon became one of its most beloved, lifting millions out of extreme poverty, stabilizing Brazil's economy and earning near-legendary status both at home and abroad.
But while Mr. da Silva has overcome his humble beginnings, his country is still grappling with its own. Perhaps more than any other challenge facing Brazil today, education is a stumbling block in its bid to accelerate its economy and establish itself as one of the world's most powerful nations, exposing a major weakness in its newfound armor.
"Unfortunately, in an era of global competition, the current state of education in Brazil means it is likely to fall behind other developing economies in the search for new investment and economic growth opportunities," the World Bank concluded in a 2008 report.
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Education Consumers Foundation:
Tennessee schools are measured on two things: achievement, seen in standardized assessment and ACT results; and growth, reported through the state's value-added assessment system. For the first time, parents and other Tennessee citizens can plot the performance of their child's school and others across the district or state through the ECF's interactive Growth vs. Achievement Charts.To view charts for each major grade level grouping, visit the following links:
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A group of high school thespians sharpened their skills this summer at a camp where they worked with professional actors by day and then watched them perform at American Players Theatre at night.The 27 students ages 13 to 17 attended Acting for Classical Theatre, an American Players Theatre residential camp. The annual six-day camp was based at Bethel Horizons Camp and Retreat Center in Dodgeville where the campers received their training and lodging.
On four nights, they traveled to the nearby American Players Theatre in Spring Green to watch Shakespearean plays. On another night, they received a backstage tour. When they got back to camp, they played theater games -- despite the late hour.
On the last day, parents and American Players Theatre employees were invited to watch the youth perform a shortened, 60-minute version of Hamlet on the American Players Theatre stage.
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When Marshall High School opens for the new school year Tuesday, it will have an almost entirely new teaching staff, a revamped curriculum and a $2 million infusion of federal money.The students and teachers at Marshall--a hulking three-story building on the city's violent West Side known as much for its powerhouse basketball teams as its abysmal test scores--are among millions nationwide who will see changes this fall as part of President Barack Obama's push to overhaul K-12 public schools.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has used much of his $100 billion budget--almost twice what his recent predecessors had--to lure states into reshaping schools through programs such as Race to the Top and school transformations like the one Marshall is undergoing.
"Mainly, this is a year to lay a foundation for the long-term reforms that will get all students college-ready," said Gene Wilhoit, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers, a nonpartisan group of state school chiefs.
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Esther Wojcicki & Michael Levine, via a Kris Olds email:
American students' lack of knowledge about the world is unsettling.According to surveys by National Geographic and Asia Society, young Americans are next to last in their knowledge of geography and current affairs compared to peers in eight other countries, and the overwhelming majority of college-bound seniors cannot find Afghanistan, Iraq or Israel on a world map.
Less than one half of today's high school students study a foreign language, and while a million study French, a language spoken by some 80 million worldwide, less than 75,000 study Chinese, a language spoken by some 1.3 billion. Minority students especially have little access to global topics taught in "higher performing" schools, ranging from languages and economics to exchanges, arts and cultural activities.
The typical teacher or supervisor is not prepared to address this gap: most educators have not taken any international courses and comparatively few participate in study abroad programs.
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The Harlem-based educator and activist Geoffrey Canada first met the filmmaker Davis Guggenheim in 2008, when Canada was in Los Angeles raising money for the Children's Defense Fund, which he chairs. Guggenheim told Canada that he was making a documentary about the crisis in America's schools and implored him to be in it. Canada had heard this pitch before, more times than he could count, from a stream of camera-toting do-gooders whose movies were destined to be seen by audiences smaller than the crowd on a rainy night at a Brooklyn Cyclones game. Canada replied to Guggenheim as he had to all the others: with a smile, a nod, and a distracted "Call my office," which translated to "Buzz off."Related: An increased emphasis on adult employment - Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman's recent speech to the Madison Rotary Club and growing expenditures on adult to adult "professional development".Then Guggenheim mentioned another film he'd made--An Inconvenient Truth--and Canada snapped to attention. "I had absolutely seen it," Canada recalls, "and I was stunned because it was so powerful that my wife told me we couldn't burn incandescent bulbs anymore. She didn't become a zealot; she just realized that [climate change] was serious and we have to do something." Canada agreed to be interviewed by Guggenheim, but still had his doubts. "I honestly didn't think you could make a movie to get people to care about the kids who are most at risk."
Two years later, Guggenheim's new film, Waiting for "Superman," is set to open in New York and Los Angeles on September 24, with a national release soon to follow. It arrives after a triumphal debut at Sundance and months of buzz-building screenings around the country, all designed to foster the impression that Guggenheim has uncorked a kind of sequel: the Inconvenient Truth of education, an eye-opening, debate-defining, socially catalytic cultural artifact.
Everyone should see this film; Waiting for Superman. Madison's new Urban League President, Kaleem Caire hosted a screening of The Lottery last spring. (Thanks to Chan Stroman for correcting me on the movie name!)
Caire is driving the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy International Baccalaureate charter school initiative.
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The start of the school year brings another one of those nagging, often unquenchable worries of parenthood: How good will my child's teachers be? Teachers tend to have word-of-mouth reputations, of course. But it is hard to know how well those reputations match up with a teacher's actual abilities. Schools generally do not allow parents to see any part of a teacher's past evaluations, for instance. And there is nothing resembling a rigorous, Consumer Reports-like analysis of schools, let alone of individual teachers. For the most part, parents just have to hope for the best.That, however, may be starting to change. A few months ago, a team of reporters at The Los Angeles Times and an education economist set out to create precisely such a consumer guide to education in Los Angeles. The reporters requested and received seven years of students' English and math elementary-school test scores from the school district. The economist then used a statistical technique called value-added analysis to see how much progress students had made, from one year to the next, under different third- through fifth-grade teachers. The variation was striking. Under some of the roughly 6,000 teachers, students made great strides year after year. Under others, often at the same school, students did not. The newspaper named a few teachers -- both stars and laggards -- and announced that it would release the approximate rankings for all teachers, along with their names.
The articles have caused an electric reaction. The president of the Los Angeles teachers union called for a boycott of the newspaper. But the union has also suggested it is willing to discuss whether such scores can become part of teachers' official evaluations. Meanwhile, more than 1,700 teachers have privately reviewed their scores online, and hundreds have left comments that will accompany them.
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Doug, a longtime science teacher in Alaska, makes this observation:"It is really interesting to me that President Obama can let BP take the lead in cleaning up the disaster in the Gulf, and yet teachers have got hedge fund managers, mayors, think tank policy wonks, billionaire vulture capitalists, and no real education experts, calling the shots on public school "reform," with Arne Duncan as department head, whose teaching experience comes from volunteering at his mom's after school program (He actually says this, as if it means something!) mouthing a bunch of nonsense about educating our way to a better economy and making education the civil rights issue of our generation. Well, no. The economy tanked because of a monumental failure of government to regulate the financial industry, and manufacturing long ago moved out of the country. And before we can talk about civil rights, we need to straighten out some things with health care, endless war, mass incarceration, racism and immigration, and state-sponsored torture.
Borderland blog, June 16, 2010
When BP chief executive Tony Hayward appeared before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Chairman Henry Waxman said the Committee reviewed 30,000 documents related to the oil disaster and found "no evidence that you (Hayward) paid any attention to the tremendous risks BP was taking." Likewise no one at the National Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers, or the House and Senate education committees etc. is paying any attention to the tremendous risks the U. S. Department of Education is taking with its money bribes to the states.
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Columbus Education Association:
Dr. Diane Ravitch is a polarizing figure in the education world. From 1991-1993, Ravitch served as Assistant Secretary of Education in President George H.W. Bush's administration. Originally a strong proponent of school choice, vouchers and high-stakes testing, her views have changed considerably. She argues for her change of heart and in her new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System.Mike Antonucci has more.It was recently announced that Dr. Ravitch will receive NEA's 2010 Friend of Education Award. CEA recently interviewed Dr. Ravitch about the role of teaching and learning in the age of accountability.
Let's say you were to walk into an elementary classroom in any school district ten years from now. If we stay on the present course set by NCLB, how will teaching and learning be different?I think that there will be a great deal of drilling and teaching to the test. Most of the day will be spent on reading and mathematics. Kids will be encouraged to take lots and lots of test prep. This is happening now and I don't see any change in the foreseeable future. The secretary has said that 100 percent of all kids should be proficient. There doesn't seem to be an end date where this regime will conclude in victory. Now that so many states are tying teacher evaluation to test scores, it is predictable that we will have a system in which testing of basic skills is the basic purpose of education.
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Detroit is the next city to throw away the administrative reins and open the doors for an all-teacher-led school. Serving pre-K through eighth grade and roughly 450 students, the Palmer Park Preparatory Academy (P3A) will open in Detroit Public Schools this fall-- sans principal--replacing the Barbara Jordan Elementary School, which closed in spring 2010 to become a turnaround school after being identified as low performing. The school, which DPS students and families will apply to, is modeled after similar schools in Boston, Milwaukee, Denver and Los Angeles. P3A will partner with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to form a robust, individualized curriculum.The Detroit Public Schools teacher-led school development team with their reform partners, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Many teachers felt so passionately that they offered to sacrifice their tenure to prove they didn't fear the added responsibility of accountability, says Ann Crowley, DPS teacher and co-founder of the group Detroit Children First, an organization who had been vying for an all-teacher school for several years.
"Many excellent teachers felt they could get more for their children if they had a greater voice in the decisions that are made in their schools," says Crowley.
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PARENTS seeking the best education for their offspring often look to ancient institutions. Small wonder that schools run by either the Catholic church or the Church of England are often high on their list. Almost a quarter of all children in the state system attend a religious school, most of them Anglican- or Catholic-run primary schools.In his drive to give parents more choice in educating their children, Tony Blair raised the profile of church schools by encouraging existing ones to expand and new ones to set up shop. The former prime minister was also keen on incorporating other religions into the state system. The first state-funded Muslim and Sikh schools opened soon after he took power, and the first Hindu school in 2008.
Mr Blair's successors have lacked his zeal, but religious schools continue to flourish. One reason is that their pupils tend to do better than others in exams. In 2009, 57% of them at around age 16 passed national exams (GCSEs) with acceptable grades, including those in maths and English, compared with 51% at non-religious state schools.
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Whiteflame128, a participant in my Admissions 101 discussion group, described what happened when he graduated from a Fairfax County high school and showed up for college enrollment with an entire freshman year's worth of credit from Advanced Placement courses and tests. "My advisor had absolutely no idea what to do with my schedule at orientation," he said.Many students have encountered this problem, some of them in just the last few weeks in this enrollment season. All those extra credits, from AP or International Baccalaureate, don't fit easily into the standard college schedule. They force newcomers to compete with second-year students for limited space in second-year courses. They aggravate the need to take less favored courses just to maintain full-time status. They waste time and money. What do to about this is hard to figure out. Most of the colleges seem to throw up their hands.
Admissions 101 participant grcxx3 said "my son and I were just caught off-guard about how difficult it would be to schedule classes for that first year." Grcxxe said the AP, IB or local college dual enrollment her son took in high school meant he was "coming in with 18-plus hours of credit, much of which [could exempt him from] common freshman classes (like freshman English) and basic general ed classes that are often taken during the first year"
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In his most recent post he also hands me some ammo to fire back at him. He quotes an online letter to President Obama from a reader, Ira Socol. Socol is critical of the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), as an example of the kind of charter school the president admires, and compares KIPP unfavorably---too rigid, too uncreative, too imperialist---to the Sidwell Friends School which Obama's daughters attend. This is reminiscent of a point made by the late, great Gerald W. Bracey at the beginning of the Obama administration.Sadly, Socol makes the same mistake Jim has made many times. He cites as evidence for his views of teaching at KIPP and Sidwell some descriptions he found on their Web sites. Any good teacher would tell you that is no way to judge a school. Socol gives no indication he has ever spent time inside a KIPP school, or Sidwell. Neither has Jim, unless I have missed something. They are among the many KIPP critics who consider it sufficient to judge schools by what they read on the Internet.
I think they should visit the schools they write about and tell us what they see. All of the KIPP schools I know have an open door policy. There are 99 KIPP schools in 20 states and D.C., including one in each of the 20 largest cities except Phoenix. I have visited many KIPP schools and Sidwell. I think Socol, and Jim, will be surprised, once they get inside, at how little difference there is between the great teaching going on at both places.
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The group, including the presidents of the L.A. Area Chamber of Commerce and United Way of Greater L.A., urges the use of student test score data and more access to information about instructors for families.A group of business and civic leaders is urging the Los Angeles school district and teachers union to quickly develop a new evaluation system that incorporates student test score data and gives families more access to information about instructors.
"This system should be transparent and the results of the teacher evaluations should be made available to parents," said a letter signed by former U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher, as well as the presidents of both the L.A. Area Chamber of Commerce and United Way of Greater L.A., and 18 other people.
The civic group also endorsed including value-added analysis -- a statistical method that links student test scores to their teachers -- in teacher performance reviews and cited a Times series on the subject as one reason they decided to weigh in.
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Interesting discussion on the teachers contract at the Daily Kos. From the thread (italics mine, bold theirs):Wednesday afternoon the Seattle teachers' union (SEA) achieved a huge victory over the proponents of what is popularly (and erroneously) known as "education reform."And actually, it is a real victory for the teachers (in terms of ridding themselves of what they did not want in the contract) and anyone who does not support the ed-reform push by wealthy foundations and the DOE.After many, many hours of hard negotiations, the SEA negotiators achieved a tentative contract with the district. What is remarkable about this contract is that:
This tentative agreement was reached despite intensive efforts by the Broad-Foundation-connected superintendent to insert test scores into all three of the above areas.
- Teachers' final evaluations will not depend on student test scores. * Teachers' jobs will not depend on student test scores.
- Teachers' pay will not depend on student test scores.
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Minister Ng Eng Hen announced several education initiatives.These include better infrastructure to support learning, new progression choices for Normal (Academic) students, new specialised schools for Normal (Technical) students, and an extension of the Integrated Programme to more schools .
A new medical school will start in 2013 and MOE will also fund a number of new places in new degree courses in NAFA and LASALLE.
Opening Remarks by Dr Ng Eng Hen at the National Day Rally Media Conference held at the MOE Function Room 31 August 2010.
Investing in All Learners, Creating New Opportunities and Pathways
Singapore's rapid progress has been made possible only through the sheer ability, tenacity and wits of its people.
We must nurture this critical human resource through education as it is our most precious asset. Singapore is fortunate to have a strong and respected education system and good teachers, which have resulted from persistent efforts in the last three decades.
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The role of test scores in evaluating teachers is a prickly and complicated issue, which is why California has been avoiding the conversation for so long. Fortunately, that procrastination is no longer possible after The Times took the bold step of analyzing standardized test scores in the Los Angeles Unified School District to see whether individual teachers appeared to be successful at raising their students' scores.Given the current nationwide push to include test data in teacher evaluations, it was time to strip away the mystery about test scores and take a close look at what they are, what they show and don't show, and what teachers, administrators and the rest of us might learn from them. The Times' articles and online database rating nearly 6,000 elementary school teachers allow the examination to begin.
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Wisconsin State Journal Editorial
Another national magazine says Madison is one of the nation's best cities in which to raise a family.Madison School Board member Ed Hughes compares WKCE scores, comments on the Kiplinger and Wisconsin State Journal article and wonders if anyone would move from Madison to College Station, TX [map], which Kiplinger's ranked above our local $15,241 2009/2010 per student public schools.That's something to celebrate.
But Kiplinger's, a monthly business and personal finance periodical, also raps ours city schools as "weak" in its latest edition.
That's troubling.
"Madison city schools are weak relative to the suburban schools," the magazine wrote in its analysis of the pros and cons of living here with children.
Really?
The magazine apparently used average test scores to reach its conclusion. By that single measure, yes, Dane County's suburban schools tend to do better.
But the city schools have more challenges - higher concentrations of students in poverty, more students who speak little or no English when they enroll, more students with special needs.
None of those factors should be excuses. Yet they are reality.
And Madison, in some ways, is ahead of the 'burbs. It consistently graduates some of the highest-achieving students in the state. It offers far more kinds of classes and clubs. Its diverse student population can help prepare children for an increasingly diverse world.
I compared Madison, WI to College Station, TX using a handy Census Bureau report.
93.8% of College Station residents over 25 are high school graduates, a bit higher than Madison's 92.4%.Madison does have a higher median household and per capita income along with a population about three times that of College Station.58.1% of College Station residents over 25 have a bachelor's degree or higher, compared to Madison's 48.2%
Turning to the public school districts, readers might be interested in having a look at both websites: the College Station Independent School District and the Madison Metropolitan School District. 75% of College Station students took the ACT (average score: 22.6) while 67% of Madison students took the exam and achieved a composite score of 24.2.
College Station publishes a useful set of individual school report cards, which include state and national test results along with attendance and dropout data.
College Station's 2009-2010 budget was $93,718.470, supporting 9,712 students = $9,649.76 per student. . They also publish an annual check register, allowing interested citizens to review expenditures.
Madison's 2009-2010 budget was $370,287,471 for 24,295 students = $15,241 per student, 57.9% higher than College Station.
College Station's A and M Consolidated High School offers 22 AP classes while Madison East offers 12, Memorial 25 (8 of which are provided by Florida Virtual...), LaFollette 13 and West 8.
College Station's "student profile" notes that the District is 59.3% white, 31.4% are economically disadvantaged while 10.3% are in talented and gifted.
Texas's 2010 National Merit Semifinalist cut score was 216 while Wisconsin's was 207. College Station's high school had 16 National Merit Semi-Finalists (the number might be 40 were College Station the same size as Madison and perhaps still higher with Wisconsin's lower cut score) during the most recent year while Madison's high schools had 57.
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I went to McDonald's this weekend with the kids. We go to McDonald's to eat about once a week because it is a mile from the house and has an indoor play area. Our normal routine is to walk in to McDonald's, stand in line, order, stand around waiting for the order, sit down, eat and play.
On Sunday, this decades-old routine changed forever. When we walked in to McDonald's, an attractive woman in a suit greeted us and said, "Are you planning to visit the play area tonight?" The kids screamed, "Yeah!" "McDonald's has a new system that you can use to order your food right in the play area. Would you like to try it?" The kids screamed, "Yeah!"The woman walks us over to a pair of kiosks in the play area. She starts to show me how the kiosks work and the kids scream, "We want to do it!" So I pull up a chair and the kids stand on it while the (extremely patient) woman in a suit walks the kids through the screens. David ordered his food, Irena ordered her food, I ordered my food. It's a simple system. Then it was time to pay. Interestingly, the kiosk only took cash in the form of bills. So I fed my bills into the machine. Then you take a little plastic number to set on your table and type the number in. The transaction is complete.
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I take it that you think that nearly all of the value of schooling is signaling? I used to take that view too, but the accumulation of evidence that I've seen leads me to believe that isn't the case.For one thing I find it very hard to believe that we would waste so many resources on a nearly unproductive enterprise. There are plenty of entrepreneurs out there trying to make money by selling cheaper, in time and money, versions of education and they aren't very successful. Mainstream schools have experimented with programmed learning, lectures on video, self-paced learning, etc. and none of the methods have caught on. Why wouldn't they if they worked?
Of course its hard to believe that reading novels and poems contributes much to ones productivity on the job. So how do I square curriculum content with my view that education is productive? Here goes:
1. Education isn't mainly about learning specific subject matter. Rather education is mainly about practicing the sort of self-discipline that is necessary to be productive in a modern work environment. High school allows you to practice showing up on time and doing what you are told. College allows you to practice and work out techniques that work for you that allow you to take on and complete on time complicated multi-part tasks in an environment where you have considerable freedom about how you spend your time. Some people may be more talented than others at this sort of thing (you come to mind as someone who is particularly talented at self-discipline), but this is also an acquired skill that one can develop with practice, and everyone needs to develop certain work habits that make one more productive at both types of tasks.
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Kindle owners buy twice as many books as non-Kindle owners. Just one of the many signs that while the paper book is dead, the narrative will live on.If you are saying to yourself, "That sounds horrible. I hope books do not go away," I ask you to consider the world's poorest and most remote kids.
The manufactured book stunts learning, especially for those children. The last thing these children should have are physical books. They are too costly, too heavy, fall out-of-date and are sharable only in some common and limited physical space.
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Over the next 10 years, scientific experts will be dealing with "extreme weather." No one knows how weird and dangerous it will get.Moscow already faces Bahrain-like temperatures. Downpours swamp a fifth of Pakistan. President Mohamed Nasheed, of the Maldives, worries enough about future sea levels to hold a cabinet meeting underwater in scuba gear. (Don't miss this on YouTube!)
Parallel thinking should apply to a phenomenon of greater concern to readers here: "extreme academe." Think of it as the hysterical upgrading of ugly visions of the future already found in polite critiques of higher ed.
Back in 2003, for instance, former Harvard President Derek Bok, in Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education (Princeton University Press), drilled home the problem capsulized in his subtitle by noting that throughout the 1980s, deans and professors brought him "one proposition after another to exchange some piece or product of Harvard for money--often, quite substantial sums of money."
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A whole week of catharsis, yet the Garden State still agonizes over the loss of $400 million in Race To The Top money. Ex-Commissioner Bret Schundler is out on his keister -- amid calls for legislative hearings because of a botched question that pushed us into the losers' column by three points. (NJ came in 11th with 437.8 points; Ohio, the 10th of 10 winners, got 440.8.)NJ Facebook Group: New Jersey Teachers United Against Governor Chris Christie's Pay Freeze
More pertinent is the NJ Department of Education's perceived ineptitude. During the presentation of our application to federal reviewers, five high-level DOE staffers were unable to conjure up basic fiscal information for 2008 and 2009, instead of the mistakenly/cravenly entered information on 2011. And that's after spending $500K on a consultant.
Was the incorrect answer a clerical error? Was it a ham-handed effort to elude accountability on state school aid cuts?
Final answer: it's irrelevant.
We didn't lose the Race To The Top by a grimace-inducing three points because of a whiffed answer valued at less than one-half percent of the total 500 points. We lost because our ambitious reform plans elicited lukewarm support from local school boards and superintendents (about half signed on) and ice-cold censure from NJEA affiliates.
For comparison's sake, New York State won and had buy-in from every local union president.
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With U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan this week advocating for transparency for teacher evaluations that include, in part, standardized test scores, the National Education Association weighed in today, asking members how they'd like to be measured.NEA staffer Kevin Hart asked teachers to reply on the union's Facebook page, and reported some interesting answers.
"They believe a well-designed process can help them improve at their jobs and will ultimately benefit students," Hart wrote on the union's NEA Today website. "But teachers believe any evaluation process should be fair, consistently applied, and take into account the realities of their profession."
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Local education officials presented a glowing image of Bakersville Elementary School and the Manchester School District during a meeting with U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on Tuesday morning.Teachers told the secretary that faculty members love what they do and treat each other like family. Parents said their children feel comfortable in the welcoming school, and Superintendent Thomas Brennan thanked city officials for providing much needed resources for books and staff.
Duncan was at Bakersville, labeled a "persistently low-achieving school" by the state Department of Education, as part of his Courage in the Classroom tour throughout the state this week. On Monday, Duncan visited Keene State College, and on Tuesday afternoon, he headed to Portsmouth Naval Shipyard to talk to military families.
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Did Bill Gates waste a billion dollars because he failed to understand the formula for the standard deviation of the mean? Howard Wainer makes the case in the entertaining Picturing the Uncertain World (first chapter with the Gates story free here). The Gates Foundation certainly spent a lot of money, along with many others, pushing for smaller schools and a lot of the push came because people jumped to the wrong conclusion when they discovered that the smallest schools were consistently among the best performing schools.Related: Small Learning Communities and English 10........
States like North Carolina which reward schools for big performance gains without correcting for size end up rewarding small schools for random reasons. Worst yet, the focus on small schools may actually be counter-productive because large schools do have important advantages such as being able to offer more advanced classes and better facilities.
Schools2 All of this was laid out in 2002 in a wonderful paper I teach my students every year, Thomas Kane and Douglas Staiger's The Promise and Pitfalls of Using Imprecise School Accountability Measures.
In recent years Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation have acknowledged that their earlier emphasis on small schools was misplaced. Perhaps not coincidentally the Foundation recently hired Thomas Kane to be deputy director of its education programs.
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Last week, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced the latest winners of Race to the Top, the initiative he devised to leverage federal dollars to drive education reform at the state level. While no grant process is perfect, the competition drove a remarkable volume of new plans and even new laws designed to advance educational opportunity. Many states showed boldness--and I'm particularly excited that all 12 winning states mentioned Teach For America in their applications.Ms. Kopp is the founder and CEO of Teach For America. She is the author of the forthcoming book "A Chance to Make History: What Works and What Doesn't in Providing an Excellent Education for All" (PublicAffairs).This fall marks Teach For America's 20th anniversary, and I have spent much of the summer reflecting on the sea change that has taken place in public education over the last two decades.
When we set out to recruit our first corps of teachers in 1990, it would be fair to say that there was no organized movement to ensure educational opportunity for all children in our nation. The prevailing assumption in most policy circles was that socioeconomic circumstances determined educational outcomes. Thus, it was unrealistic to expect teachers or schools to overcome the effects of poverty.
When Jaime Escalante led a class of East Los Angeles students to pass the AP calculus exam in 1982, the Educational Testing Service questioned the results, and Hollywood went on to make the hit movie "Stand and Deliver" about his success. Escalante was lionized as an outlier--not as someone whose example could be widely replicated.
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Fabu:
All through the community, I have been hearing families express varying emotions about the beginning of a new school year this week. Some are glad for the relief from costly summer programs. Others are anxious about changes for their children who are moving from elementary to middle or middle to high school. One parent even shared how her daughter wakes up in the middle of the night asking questions about kindergarten.At a recent United Way Days of Caring event in Middleton for more than 100 students from Madison-area Urban Ministry, Packers and Northport, lots of children expressed excitement over starting school again and appreciated the fun as well as the backpacks filled with school supplies that Middleton partners provided.
The schools where we send our children to learn and the people we ask to respect and teach them stir up a lot of emotions, just like an article about Wisconsin ACT scores stirred up a lot of emotions in me. ACT stands for American College Testing and the scores test are used to gain entrance into college, which translates for most Americans into an ability to live well economically or to become the institutionalized poor. Certainly the good news is that Wisconsin scored third in the nation and that Madison schools' scores went up slightly.
The bad news is when your look at the scores based on racial groups, once again in Madison, in Wisconsin and in the U.S., the scores of African-American students are the lowest.
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It felt more like a day of summer camp than the first day of school, with team-building fun and games and youthful leaders in T-shirts and shorts.But the goal of ninth-grade orientation Wednesday at Madison's East High School -- the school year's first day that's been labeled "Freshman Academy" -- was serious: to lower truancy rates, curb behavior problems and raise academic success of the incoming class of 2014.
As it's been in Madison for years, the first day of school in the city's public high schools was dedicated to welcoming only ninth-graders, an effort to help them find their way before the buildings become flooded with additional sophomores, juniors and seniors Thursday.
East's new take on that is based on Link Crew, a national program designed to bond newcomers with juniors and seniors, who throughout the year will serve as mentors and personal cheerleaders to a freshman group of about six students each.
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The fight for teacher accountability is gaining traction around the country, and the latest evidence is that the unions are objecting to a newspaper bold enough to report . . . the news. That's the story out of Los Angeles, where on Sunday the Los Angeles Times published evaluations of some 6,000 city school teachers based on how well their students performed on standardized tests.The paper is defending its publication of the database as a public service amid union boycott threats, and rightly so. Since 1990, K-12 education spending has grown by 191% and now consumes more than 40% of the state budget. The Cato Institute reports that L.A. spends almost $30,000 per pupil, including capital costs for school buildings, yet the high school graduation rate is 40.6%, the second worst among large school districts in the U.S.
After decades of measuring education results only by money spent, with little to show for it, parents are finally looking for an objective measure to judge teacher effectiveness. Taxpayers also deserve to know whether the money they're paying teachers is having any impact on learning or merely financing fat pay and pensions in return for mediocrity. The database generated 230,000 page views within hours of being published on the paper's website, so the public would appear to want this information.
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Nobody but a schoolteacher or a union acolyte could criticize the Los Angeles Times' terrific package of stories--complete with searchable database--about teacher performance in the Los Angeles Unified School District.Union leader A.J. Duffy of the United Teachers Los Angeles stupidly called for a boycott of the Times. Boycotts can be sensible things, but threatening to boycott a newspaper is like threatening to throw it into a briar patch. Hell, Duffy might as well have volunteered to sell Times subscriptions, door-to-door, as to threaten a boycott. Doesn't he understand that the UTLA has no constituency outside its own members and lip service from members of other Los Angeles unions? Even they know the UTLA stands between them and a good education for their children.
Duffy further grouched that the Times was "leading people in a dangerous direction, making it seem like you can judge the quality of a teacher by ... a test." [Ellipsis in the original.] Gee, Mr. Duffy, aren't students judged by test results?
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten also knocked the Times for publishing the database that measures the performance of 6,000 elementary-school teachers. Weingarten went on to denounce the database as "incomplete data masked as comprehensive evaluations." Of course, had the Times analysis flattered teachers, Weingarten would be praising the results of the analysis.
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Kenneth M. Goldstein and William G. Howell
Over half of Wisconsinites (51 percent) told us that they were paying either "a great deal" or "quite a bit" of attention to issues involving education. In national surveys, 38 percent of the American public as a whole. When asked about specific education reforms, moreover, Wisconsinites are as much as five times more likely to stake out a clear position either in support or opposition than is the American public. Assuming such differences aren't strictly an artifact of survey methodology, a possibility we will discuss, Wisconsinites seem to pay more attention to educational issues and revealed a greater willingness to offer their opinions on education and potential reforms. In other words, when it comes to education, the people of Wisconsin have strong views and that makes them different from the rest of the country.Wisconsin residents reported higher levels of support for a variety of reforms--in particular vouchers, charter schools, online education, and merit pay--than does the nation as a whole. That said, opposition levels to these reforms were also as high or higher than the nation as a whole. Though they give their local schools slightly lower grades than does the American public, Wisconsin residents also claimed (correctly) that their students perform as well as or better than students in other states on standardized tests. And Wisconsin residents are just as enthusiastic about student accountability requirements as is the American public. And Wisconsinites have another thing in common with their fellow Americans: they vastly underestimate the actual amount of money that is spent each year on students in public schools.
There is another important element that can be taken from this poll. The divide between residents of Milwaukee and the rest of the state is deep. When asked about the quality of education in the state, Milwaukee residents offered significantly lower assessments than do residents statewide. In addition, city of Milwaukee residents distinguish themselves from other Wisconsinites for their higher levels of support for various education policy reforms.
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Los Angeles school board members made their first public statements Tuesday about evaluating teachers partially by analyzing student test scores, with most saying that the current system needs to be reworked and some adding that parents deserve more information about their children's teachers."As a parent, I think I have a right to know," said board member Nury Martinez, who added that she did not believe that the general public should be able to see a teacher's entire review.
Martinez also acknowledged that the district has lagged in updating its evaluation system.
"I also believe this conversation has taken way too long. I think we're talking years and years and years," she said. "We need to get the ball moving here."
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In "Steal This Movie, Too" (column, Aug. 25), Thomas L. Friedman is right to rejoice in those educators working from the bottom up.I have been lucky enough to have enjoyed a career as a teaching artist in the Catskills and in New York City for many years. I see the really great teachers and administrators every day, and they have two important characteristics in common: they love and respect the children, and they love and are open to thought.
Everything else follows -- the expectations that the children really want to learn and will do well, the enthusiasm with which the educators seek out and bring new ideas to the classroom and are willing to listen to the students' theories, and the eagerness to bring others into the classroom to contribute other concepts. These educators should indeed be championed.
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Dr. Matthew Ladner, Andrew T. LeFevre, and Dan Lip
ALEC's 16th edition of the Report Card on American Education contains a comprehensive overview of educational achievement levels (performance and gains for low-income students) for the 50 states and the District of Columbia (see full report for complete methodology). The Report Card details what education policies states currently have in place and provides a roadmap for legislators to follow to bring about educational excellence in their state.
With its foreword written by the former governor of Florida, Jeb Bush, this completely revised Report Card on American Education: Ranking State K-12 Performance, Progress, and Reform examines the reforms enacted under his tenure and how Florida has risen from consistently earning near-bottom scores to ranking third in the country.
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As students in the state's first online-only public school, they will log onto a computer and find out what books they need to read and what new skills they should master.The Massachusetts Virtual Academy opens in Greenfield on Thursday, not only as the first in the state, but also as the first virtual school in New England to serve students from kindergarten through high school.
At virtual school, the students will take all of their classes online and have a learning coach make sure they complete their assignments. A parent could be certified, for instance, to be the learning coach.
The student can work anytime of day and some may never see their teachers in person.
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Paul Fanlund, via a kind reader:
In fact, the changing face of Madison's school population comes up consistently in other interviews with public officials.Related: the growth in outbound open enrollment from the Madison School District and ongoing budget issues, including a 10% hike in property taxes this year and questions over 2005 maintenance referendum spending.Police Chief Noble Wray commented recently that gang influences touch even some elementary schools, and Mayor Dave Cieslewicz expressed serious concern last week that the young families essential to the health and vitality of Madison are too often choosing to live outside the city based on perceptions of the city's schools.
Nerad says he saw the mayor's remarks, and agrees the challenge is real. While numbers for this fall will not be available for weeks, the number of students who live in Madison but leave the district for some alternative through "open enrollment" will likely continue to grow."For every one child that comes in there are two or three going out," Nerad says, a pattern he says he sees in other urban districts. "That is the challenge of quality urban districts touched geographically by quality suburban districts."
The number of "leavers" grew from 90 students as recently as 2000-01 to 613 last year, though the increase might be at least partly attributed to a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that greatly curtailed the ability of school districts to use race when deciding where students will go to school. In February 2008, the Madison School Board ended its long-standing practice of denying open enrollment requests if they would create a racial imbalance.
Two key reasons parents cited in a survey last year for moving children were the desire for better opportunities for gifted students and concerns about bullying and school safety. School Board member Lucy Mathiak told me last week that board members continue to hear those two concerns most often.
Nerad hears them too, and he says that while some Madison schools serve gifted students effectively, there needs to be more consistency across the district. On safety, he points to a recent district policy on bullying as evidence of focus on the problem, including emphasis on what he calls the "bystander" issue, in which witnesses need to report bullying in a way that has not happened often enough.
For all the vexing issues, though, Nerad says much is good about city schools and that perceptions are important. "Let's be careful not to stereotype the urban school district," he says. "There is a lot at stake here."
The significant property tax hike and ongoing budget issues may be fodder for the upcoming April, 2011 school board election, where seats currently occupied by Ed Hughes and Marj Passman will be on the ballot.
Superintendent Nerad's statement on "ensuring that we have a stable middle class" is an important factor when considering K-12 tax and spending initiatives, particularly in the current "Great Recession" where housing values are flat or declining and the property tax appetite is increasing (The Tax Foundation, via TaxProf:
The Case-Shiller index, a popular measure of residential home values, shows a drop of almost 16% in home values across the country between 2007 and 2008. As property values fell, one might expect property tax collections to have fallen commensurately, but in most cases they did not.It will be interesting to see what the Madison school District's final 2010-2011 budget looks like. Spending and receipts generally increase throughout the year. This year, in particular, with additional borrowed federal tax dollars on the way, the District will have funds to grow spending, address the property tax increase or perhaps as is now increasingly common, spend more on adult to adult professional development.Data on state and local taxes from the U.S. Census Bureau show that most states' property owners paid more in FY 2008 (July 1, 2007, through June 30, 2008) than they had the year before (see Table 1). Nationwide, property tax collections increased by more than 4%. In only four states were FY 2008's collections lower than in FY 2007: Michigan, South Carolina, Texas and Vermont. And in three states--Florida, Indiana and New Mexico--property tax collections rose more than 10%.
Madison's K-12 environment is ripe for change. Perhaps the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy charter school will ignite the community.
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How good is one teacher compared with another?A growing number of school districts have adopted a system called value-added modeling to answer that question, provoking battles from Washington to Los Angeles -- with some saying it is an effective method for increasing teacher accountability, and others arguing that it can give an inaccurate picture of teachers' work.
The system calculates the value teachers add to their students' achievement, based on changes in test scores from year to year and how the students perform compared with others in their grade.
People who analyze the data, making a few statistical assumptions, can produce a list ranking teachers from best to worst.
Use of value-added modeling is exploding nationwide. Hundreds of school systems, including those in Chicago, New York and Washington, are already using it to measure the performance of schools or teachers. Many more are expected to join them, partly because the Obama administration has prodded states and districts to develop more effective teacher-evaluation systems than traditional classroom observation by administrators.
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The Royal Society, Britain's science academy, is curious as to why British youngsters seem to be going off studying computing at school. The number of people studying the subject has fallen by a third over the past four years, which is odd, considering how much boilerplate we get from the great and the good about the importance of computer literacy in today's wired world.I fully agree. We should not be so focused on teaching powerpoint, or word. Each student should know essential html and an understanding of how to solve problems with computers, and create new opportunities.The RS is getting together with teaching outfits and the Royal Academy of Engineering. They intend to investigate the problem and produce a report. As is compulsory for anything to do with science in modern, cash-strapped Britain, the RS worries dutifully that having fewer kids studying computing will damage Britain's economy. Maybe. But I want to defend computing not because a good computing curriculum might raise GDP by a few percentages points, but because the subject deserves on its own merits to be part of any modern, liberal education.
Full disclosure: your correspondent is a huge computer nerd, and has been ever since he was in short trousers. I'm familiar with the problem the RS describes: when I was at secondary school over a decade ago, our computing classes were terribly dull. In fact, they weren't really about computing at all. They were about the quirks of Word, how to make pretty charts in Excel and the importance of backing up your files, the sorts of things taught on computers-for-the-clueless courses like the European Computer Driving Licence. In fact, the analogy with a driving licence illustrates the point nicely: for me, the classes were rather like going on an automotive engineering course, only to find it was all about how to perform hill starts and three-point turns. From talking to today's teenagers, it seems little has changed.
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New York City's standalone middle schools do a worse job educating students than schools that offer kindergarten through eighth grade under one roof, according to a new study to be released Wednesday by researchers at Columbia University.The complete paper is available here:On average, children who move up to middle school from a traditional city elementary school, which typically goes up to fifth grade, score about seven percentiles lower on standardized math tests in eighth grade than those who attend a K-8 school, says Jonah Rockoff, an associate professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Business who co-authored the study.
The disparity stems from the toll that changing to a new school takes on adolescents and differences in the sizes of grades, the study says. Typically, K-8 schools can fit fewer children in each grade than standalone middle schools.
"What we found bolsters the case for middle-school reform." says Mr. Rockoff, noting that there aren't significant differences in financial resources or single class sizes between the two types of schools. Standalone "middle schools, where kids are educated in larger groups, are not the best way to educate students in New York City."
The research culls data for city school children who started in grades three through eight during the 1998-99 school year and tracks them through the 2007-2008 school year, comparing test scores, attendance rates and parent evaluations. Of the student sample, 15,000 students attended a K-8 school versus 177,000 who attended a standalone middle school.
We examine the implications of separating students of different grade levels across schools for the purposes of educational production. Specifically, we find that moving students from elementary to middle school in 6th or 7th grade causes significant drops in academic achievement. These effects are large (about 0.15 standard deviations), present for both math and English, and persist through grade 8, the last year for which we have achievement data. The effects are similar for boys and girls, but stronger for students with low levels of initial achievement. We instrument for middle school attendance using the grade range of the school students attended in grade 3, and employ specifications that control for student fixed effects. This leaves only one potential source of bias--correlation between grade range of a student's grade 3 school and unobservable characteristics that cause decreases in achievement precisely when students are due to switch schools--which we view as highly unlikely. We find little evidence that placing public school students into middle schools during adolescence is cost-effective.One of the most basic issues in the organization of public education is how to group students efficiently. Public schools in the U.S. have placed students of similar ages into grade levels since the mid-1800s, but grade configurations have varied considerably over time. At the start of the 20th century, most primary schools in the U.S. included students from kindergarten through grade 8, while the early 1900s saw the rise of the "junior high school," typically spanning grades 7-8 or 7-9 (Juvonen et al., 2004). More recently, school districts have shifted toward the use of "middle schools," which typically span grades 6-8 or 5-8.1 Interestingly, middle schools and junior high schools have never been popular among private schools.2
The impact of grade configuration has received little attention by economists relative to issues such as class size or teacher quality. There are a few studies which provide evidence that the transition to middle school is associated with a loss of academic achievement, elevated suspension rates, and reduced self esteem (Alspaugh (1998a, 1998b), Weiss and Kipnes, (2006), Byrnes and Ruby (2007), Cook et al. (2008)). There is also a large body of work by educational researchers and developmental psychologists documenting changes in attitudes and motivation as children enter adolescence (Eccles et al. (1984)), and some have hypothesized that instructional differences in middle schools contribute to these changes. However, these studies examine differences between middle school and elementary school students using cross-sectional data, and therefore are unable to reject the hypothesis that differences across students, rather than differences in grade configuration, are responsible for divergent educational outcomes.3
In this study, we use panel data in New York City to measure the effects of alternative grade configurations. Specifically, we focus on variation in achievement within students over time, and examine how student achievement is affected by movement into middle schools. Elementary schools in New York City typically serve students until grade 5 or grade 6, while a smaller portion extend through grade 8; thus most students move to a middle school in either grade 6 or grade 7, while some never move to a middle school. We find that achievement falls substantially (about 0.15 standard deviations in math and English) when students move to middle school, relative to their peers who do not move. Importantly, these negative effects persist through grade 8, the highest grade level on which test data are available.
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Liam Goldrick & Dr. Sara Goldrick-Rab
Seeing as I am not paid to blog as part of my daily job, it's basically impossible for me to be even close to first out of the box on the issues of the day. Add to that being a parent of two small children (my most important job - right up there with being a husband) and that only adds to my sometimes frustration of not being able to weigh in on some of these issues quickly.That said, here is my attempt to distill some key points and share my opinions -- add value, if you will -- to the debate that is raging as a result of the Los Angeles Times's decision to publish the value-added scores of individual teachers in the L.A. Unified School District.
First of all, let me address the issue at hand. I believe that the LA Times's decision to publish the value-added scores of individual teachers was irresponsible. Given what we know about the unreliability and variability in such scores and the likelihood that consumers of said scores will use them at face value without fully understanding all of the caveats, this was a dish that should have been sent back to the kitchen.
Although the LA Times is not a government or public entity, it does operate in the public sphere. And it has a responsibility as such an actor. Its decision to label LA teachers as 'effective' and 'ineffective' based on suspect value-added data alone is akin to an auditor secretly investigating a firm or agency without an engagement letter and publishing findings that may or may not hold water.
Frankly, I don't care what positive benefits this decision by the LA Times might have engendered. Yes, the district and the teachers union have agreed to begin negotiations on a new evaluation system. Top district officials have said they want at least 30% of a teacher's review to be based on value-added and have wisely said that the majority of the evaluations should depend on classroom observations. Such a development exonerates the LA Times, as some have argued. In my mind, any such benefits are purloined and come at the expense of sticking it -- rightly in some cases, certainly wrongly in others -- to individual teachers who mostly are trying their best.
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522K PDF via a Kaleem Caire email:
Based on current education and social conditions, the fate of boys of color is uncertain.More here.Black boys are grossly over-represented among youth failing to achieve academic success, are at grave risk of dropping out of school before they reach 10th grade, are disproportionately represented among adjudicated and incarcerated youth, and are far less likely than their peers in other subgroups to achieve to their dreams and aspirations.
Research indicates that although black boys have high aspirations for academic and career success, their underperformance in school and lack of educational attainment undermine their career pursuits and the success they desire. This misalignment of aspirations and achievement is fueled by and perpetuates a set of social conditions wherein black males find themselves disproportionately represented among the unemployed and incarcerated. Without meaningful, targeted, and sustainable interventions and support systems, hundreds of thousands of young Black men will never realize their true potential and the cycle of high unemployment, fatherless homes, overcrowded jails, incarcerated talent, deferred dreams, and high rates of school failure will continue.
Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men (aka Madison Prep) will be established to serve as a catalyst for change and opportunity among young men of color. Its founders understand that poverty, isolation, structural discrimination, lack of access to positive male role models and achievement-oriented peer groups, limited exposure to opportunity and culture outside their neighborhood or city, and a general lack of understanding - and in some cases fear - of black boys among adults are major contributing factors to why so many young men are failing to achieve to their full potential. However, the Urban League of Greater Madison - the "founders" of Madison Prep - also understand that these issues can be addressed by directly countering each issue with a positive, exciting, engaging, enriching, challenging, affirming and structured learning community designed to exclusively benefit boys.
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Five years ago yesterday, the levees broke. Hurricane Katrina flooded roughly 80% of this city, causing nearly $100 billion in damage. The storm forced us to rebuild our homes, workplaces and many of our institutions--including our failing public education system.But from the flood waters, the most market-driven public school system in the country has emerged. Education reformers across America should take notice: The model is working.
Citywide, the number of fourth-grade students who pass the state's standardized tests has jumped by almost a third--to 65% in 2010 from 49% in 2007. The passage rate among eighth-graders during the same period has improved at a similar clip, to 58% from 44%.
In high school, the transformation has been even more impressive. Since 2007, the percentage of students meeting the state's proficiency goals is up 44% for English and 45% for math. Schools have achieved this dramatic improvement despite serving a higher percentage of low-income students--84%--than they did before the storm. Many of these students missed months or even a whole year of school.
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The next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, the world's most definitive work on the language, will never be printed because of the impact of the internet on book sales.Sales of the third edition of the vast tome have fallen due to the increasing popularity of online alternatives, according to its publisher.
A team of 80 lexicographers has been working on the third edition of the OED - known as OED3 - for the past 21 years.
The dictionary's owner, Oxford University Press (OUP), said the impact of the internet means OED3 will probably appear only in electronic form.
The most recent OED has existed online for more than a decade, where it receives two million hits a month from subscribers who pay an annual fee of £240.
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More than a fifth of the incoming kindergarteners registered in the Madison School District will be more ready for school this fall after attending a six-week summer program.The full-day K-Ready program helps children prepare for kindergarten by working on academic readiness skills such as letter recognition, name writing and counting. They also have the opportunity to learn what school is like, how to get along with others, and how to listen to a teacher.
This summer, the program grew to a new high of 460 students - about 22 percent of projected kindergarteners.
Fakeith Hopson enrolled his daughter, Aniyah, who will attend Leopold Elementary School, in the K-Ready program at Huegel Elementary School and was impressed by the strides she made in counting and saying her ABCs. She also learned how to tie her shoes.
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"At some schools, a teaching load of five courses every academic year is considered excessive. But Sal Khan, as an earlier Slashdot post noted, manages to deliver his mini-lectures an average of 70,000 times a day. BusinessWeek reports that Khan Academy has a new fan in Bill Gates, who's been singing and tweeting the praises of the free-as-in-beer website. 'This guy is amazing,' Gates wrote. 'It is awesome how much he has done with very little in the way of resources.' Gates and his 11-year-old son have been soaking up videos, from algebra to biology. And at the Aspen Ideas Festival in front of 2,000 people, Gates gave Khan a shout-out, touting the 'unbelievable' Khan Academy tutorials that 'I've been using with my kids.'"
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Students are returning to school this week. But they're not heading back to class -- they're walking straight into a war zone. Our kids have become cannon fodder for two rival ideologies battling to control America's future.In one camp are conservative Christians and their champion, the Texas State Board of Education; in the other are politically radical multiculturalists and their de facto champion, President Barack Obama. The two competing visions couldn't be more different. And the stakes couldn't be higher. Unfortunately, whichever side wins -- your kid ends up losing.
That's because this war is for the power to dictate what our children are taught -- and, by extension, how future generations of Americans will view the world. Long gone are the days when classrooms were for learning: now each side sees the public school system as a vast indoctrination camp in which future culture-warriors are trained. The problem is, two diametrically opposed philosophies are struggling for supremacy, and neither is willing to give an inch, so the end result is extremism, no matter which side temporarily comes out on top.
Both visions are grotesque and unacceptable -- and yet they are currently the only two choices on the national menu. Which shall it be, sir: Brainwashing Fricassee, or a Fried Ignorance Sandwich?
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"In Madison, I can point to a long history of failure when it comes to educating African-American boys," says Caire, a Madison native and a graduate of West High School. He is blunt about the problems of many black students in Madison.Fabulous."We have one of the worst achievement gaps in the entire country. I'm not seeing a concrete plan to address that fact, even in a district that prides itself on innovative education. Well, here's a plan that's innovative, and that has elements that have been very successful elsewhere. I'd like to see it have a chance to change kids' lives here," says Caire, who is African-American and has extensive experience working on alternative educational models, particularly in Washington, D.C.
One of the most vexing problems in American education is the difference in how well minority students, especially African-American children, perform academically in comparison to their white peers. With standardized test scores for black children in Wisconsin trailing those from almost every other state in the nation, addressing the achievement gap is a top priority for educators in the Badger State. Although black students in Madison do slightly better academically than their counterparts in, say, Milwaukee, the comparison to their white peers locally creates a Madison achievement gap that is, as Caire points out, at the bottom of national rankings.
He's become a fan of same-sex education because it "eliminates a lot of distractions" and he says a supportive environment of high expectations has proven to be especially helpful for improving the academic performance of African-American boys.
Caire intends to bring the proposal for the boys-only charter prep school before the Madison School Board in October or November, then will seek a planning grant for the school from the state Department of Public Instruction in April, and if all goes according to the ambitious business plan, Madison Prep would open its doors in 2012 with 80 boys in grades 6 and 7.
Forty more sixth-graders would be accepted at the school in each subsequent year until all grades through senior high school are filled, with a total proposed enrollment of 280 students. A similar, same-sex school for girls would promptly follow, Caire says, opening in 2013.
Five things would make Madison Prep unique, Caire says, and he believes these options will intrigue parents and motivate students.
It will be interesting to see how independent (from a governance and staffing perspective) this proposal is from the current Madison charter models. The more the better.
Clusty Search: Madison Preparatory Academy.
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TJ Mertz makes a great point here:
Last up, is "Next Steps for Future Board Development Meetings and Topics.' Board development is good and important, but with only 2/3 of the term left I hate to see too much time and energy devoted to Board Development.Charlie Mas continues to chronicle, in a similar manner to TJ, the Seattle School Board's activities.I keep coming back to this. Every year about 1/3 of the time and energy is devoted to budget matters, that leaves 2/3 to try to make things better. Put it another way; it is September, budget season starts in January. Past time to get to work.
This just leaves the closed meeting on the Superintendent evaluation. Not much to add to what I wrote here. My big point is that almost all of this process should be public. I will repost the links to things that are public:
In my view, the Madison School Board might spend time on:
Update: I received the draft Madison School Board ethics documents via a Barbara Lehman email (thanks):
Presently we do not have a policy that describes expectations regarding the performance of School Board members. The Committee developed this list on the basis of similar policies adopted by other Boards as well as our own discussion of what our expectations are for each other. The Committee members were able to reach consensus on these expectations fairly quickly.How might Number 10 affect an elected Board member's ability to disagree with District policies or activities?Expectation No.4 refers to information requests. We realize that current MMSD Policy 1515 also refers to information requests, but our thinking was that the existing policy addresses the obligation of the superintendent to respond to information requests. We do not currently have a policy that addresses a Board member's obligation to exercise judgment in submitting information requests.
Expectation No. 10 is meant to convey that School Board members hold their positions 24-hours a day and have a responsibility to the Board always to avoid behavior that would cast the Board or the District in a poor light.
These paragraphs are a modification from existing language. Although the overall intent appears to remain similar to existing policy, I recommend the existing language because I think it does a better job of expressly recognizing the competing interests between the "beliefstatements" and a Board Member's likely right, as an individual citizen (and perhaps as a candidate for office while simultaneously serving on the Board) to accept PAC contributions and or to make a statement regarding a candidate. Perhaps the langnage could make clear that no Board Member may purport to, or attempt to imply, that they are speaking for the School Board when making a statement in regard to a candidate for office. That is, they should be express that they are speaking in the individual capacity.
The Board functions most effectively when individual Board Members adhere to acceptable professional behavior. To promote acceptable conduct of the Board, Board Members should:
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When my father graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1927, I am pretty sure it was not called "The Harvard Graduate School of Medical Education." People I know who got their degrees from Harvard Law School tell me that it was never, to their knowledge, called the "Harvard Graduate School of Legal Education." I think that the Harvard Business School does not routinely refer to itself as the "Harvard Graduate School of Business Education." Harvard College (this is my 50th reunion year) has never seen the need to call itself "The Harvard Undergraduate School of Academic Subjects," as far as I know. But the Harvard Education School, where I was informed, in the late 1960s, that I had been made a "Master of Education," (!?) calls itself the "Harvard Graduate School of Education." Perhaps that makes it a status step up from being called the Harvard Normal School, but the name is, in my view, a small symptom of a deeper problem there.
I had lunch in Cambridge yesterday with a man from Madagascar, who was bringing his daughter (one of The Concord Review's authors), for her first year at Harvard College. He asked me why there seemed to be so much emphasis in United States schools on nonacademic efforts by students (I assumed he was referring to things like art, band, drama, chorus, jazz ensemble, video workshop, sports of various kinds, community service, etc., etc.). Now you have to make allowances for a geophysicist from Madagascar. After all, on that large island, and indeed in the whole Southern Hemisphere, they think that June, July, and August are Winter months, for goodness' sake!
As I tried to explain to him the long tradition of anti-intellectualism in American life, and the widespread anti-academic attitudes and efforts of so many of our school Pundits, I thought again about the way the Harvard Education School defines its mission.
As you may know, I am very biased in favor of reading and writing, especially by high school students, and since 1987, I have published 912 exemplary history essays by secondary students from 39 countries in the only journal in the world for such work, so when I have failed to stir some interest in faculty at the Harvard Education School, it has disposed me to look closer at what they are interested in other than the exemplary academic work of students at the high school (or any other) level.
To be fair, there have been a few Harvard people who have taken an interest in my work. Harold Howe II wrote to fifteen foundations on my behalf (without success) and Theodore Sizer wrote the introduction to the first issue in the Fall of 1988, and served on my Board of Directors for several years. Recently, Tony Wagner has taken an interest, and, a very good friend, William Fitzsimmons, Harvard Dean of Admissions, got his doctorate there.
But what are the research interests of faculty at the Harvard Education School, if they don't include the academic work of students? I recommend that anyone who is curious about this odd phenomenon may review the interests of this graduate faculty by looking at their website, but here a few revealing examples:
"Dr. Ronald F. Ferguson is a Lecturer in Public Policy and Senior Research Associate at the Wiener Center for Social Policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he has taught since 1983. His research publications cover issues in education policy, youth development programming, community development, economic consequences of skill disparities, and state and local economic development. For much of the past decade, Dr. Ferguson's research has focused on racial achievement gaps..."This is really a random sample and there are scores of faculty members in the School, studying all sort of things. If I were to summarize their work, I would suggest it tends toward research on poverty, race, culture, diversity, ethnicity, emotional and social disability, developmental psychology, school organization, "The True, the Beautiful, and the Good...in a post-modern, digital era," and the like, but as far as I can tell, no one there is interested in the academic study (by students) of Asian history, biology, calculus, chemistry, foreign languages, European history, physics, United States History, or any of the academic subjects many taxpayers think should be the main business of education in our schools.
"During the past two decades, [Howard] Gardner and colleagues have been involved in the design of performance-based assessments; education for understanding; the use of multiple intelligences to achieve more personalized curriculum, instruction, and pedagogy; and the quality of interdisciplinary efforts in education. Since the mid-1990s, in collaboration with psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and William Damon, Gardner has directed the GoodWork Project, a study of work that is excellent, engaging, and ethical. More recently, with longtime Project Zero colleagues Lynn Barendsen and Wendy Fischman, he has conducted reflection sessions designed to enhance the understanding and incidence of good work among young people. With Carrie James, he is investigating trust in contemporary society and ethical dimensions entailed in the use of the new digital media. Underway are studies of effective collaboration among nonprofit institutions in education and of conceptions of quality in the contemporary era. In 2008 he delivered a set of three lectures at New York's Museum of Modern Art on the topic 'The True, The Beautiful, and the Good: Reconsiderations in a post-modern, digital era.'"
"Nancy Hill's area of research focuses on variations in parenting and family socialization practices across ethnic, socioeconomic status, and neighborhood contexts. In addition, her research focuses on demographic variations in the relations between family dynamics and children's school performance and other developmental outcomes. Recent and ongoing projects include Project PASS (Promoting Academic Success for Students), a longitudinal study between kindergarten and 4th grade examining family related predictors of children's early school performance; Project Alliance/Projecto Alianzo, a multiethnic, longitudinal study of parental involvement in education at the transition between elementary and middle school. She is the co-founder of the Study Group on Race, Culture, and Ethnicity, an interdisciplinary group of scientists who develop theory and methodology for defining and understanding the cultural context within diverse families. In addition to articles in peer-reviewed journals, she recently edited a book, African American Family Life: Ecological and Cultural Diversity (Guilford, 2005) and another edited volume is forthcoming (Family-School Relations during Adolescence: Linking Interdisciplinary Research, Policy and Practice; Teachers College Press)."
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog
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It's a Wednesday morning, and Zenaida Tan is warming her students up with a little exercise in "Monster Math."That's Tan's name for math problems with monstrously big numbers. While most third-graders are learning to multiply two digits by two digits, Tan makes her class practice with 10 digits by two -- just to show them it's not so different.
On this spring day, her students pick apart the problem on the board -- 7,850,437,826 x 56 -- with the enthusiasm of game show contestants, shouting out answers before Tan can ask a question. When she accidentally blocks their view, several stand up with their notebooks and walk across the room to get a better look.
The answer comes minutes later in a singsong unison: "Four hundred and thirty-nine billion, six hundred and twenty-four million...."
Congratulations, Tan tells them, for solving it con ganas. That's Spanish for "with gusto," a phrase she picked up from watching "Stand and Deliver," a favorite film of hers about the late Jaime Escalante, the remarkably successful math teacher at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles.
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After serving on the Pajaro Valley Unified School District's Governing Board of Trustees since 2006, I've decided not to seek re-election. My years on the board have been an amazing experience, but it's time for me to step aside and allow a new community member the opportunity to offer his or her leadership to the school district.As we head into the election season and what will certainly be a climate of overheated rhetoric about what's right and what's wrong with our school district and what ought to be done about it, I think it's appropriate to lay out the duties of a school board member for the sake of voters and those who seek to serve on the board.
The California School Board Association spells out the role of a school board member very clearly: School board members are locally elected public officials entrusted with governing a community's public schools.
Along with the superintendent, board members set the long-term vision for the district so students will reach their highest potential. Board members are responsible for maintaining an efficient structure of school district operations by employing the superintendent, setting policy for hiring other personnel, setting a direction for and adopting the curriculum, and establishing budget priorities. Board members ensure accountability by evaluating the superintendent and district policies as well as monitoring all aspect of the district's operations. School board members must
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Santa Cruz County schools face major challenges in coming years. Just like most schools in California, local districts are faced with funding cuts, fewer staff members and more demands -- especially in educating students with limited English skills, many from disadvantaged socio-economic circumstances.In addition, schools are trying to cope with ever increasing demands to raise standards and be more accountable to state and local government for results.
In the series, State of Our Schools, which concludes today, the Sentinel reports that local schools will be operating with fewer teachers, more students in classrooms, less support help and, in some districts, a shorter school year.
Clearly, most people in the county and state don't like to see school funding cut. The easiest answer is to simply restore the funding.
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Change forces and market drivers (described in 3×5 revolution) are finally bringing the digital revolution to education. Online learning is creating new options for students. Blending online and onsite learning has the potential to improve learning and operating productivity. The digital learning revolution is creating 10 shifts int he way we learn (first explored in a 7/3 post)1.Responsibility. Families are taking back responsibility for learning and choices in learning are exploding. In America, most states grant charters to nonprofit groups to operate independent schools. New York City closed 90 failing schools and invited community organization to assist in developing 400 new schools. Independently run government funded education is common in Europe, Scandinavia, and Chile. Low cost private schools provide educational options in India and Africa.
Higher learning choices are expanding; and while traditional college costs spiral higher, some new options like Open University are free, and some are very low cost. Competency-based programs like Western Governor's University give credit for demonstrated expertise. Straighter Line allows students to earn college credits on an accelerated basis for $99 per month.
2.Expectations. The standards movement, culminating in the Common Core,[iii] reflects American political consensus that all students should be eligible and prepared for higher learning--a monumental step for equity but with the unintended consequence of standardizing a 19th century version of schooling based on age cohorts, credit hours and bubble sheet tests.
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"Revolutionary." "Disruptive." These terms are used with such frequency that they may have lost much of their meaning. That's not to say that there aren't plenty of products and services that are innovative, and plenty of systems, plenty of organizations that are ripe for disruption or "revolution." Take education, for example. Our modern education system is, after all, not so modern, with many of its practices strongly rooted in a "factory" model circa the Industrial Revolution. But what does revolutionizing education really look like? And which startups working in education technology are really "disruptive"?A recent thread on Quora bypasses the "revolutionary" and "disruptive" adjectives, asking instead "What are some interesting startups in the education space?" But a recent blog post at The Teaching Master does invoke these adjective, listing the "Top 25 Web Startups Revolutionizing Teaching." Neither the Quora nor the Teaching Master post offer metrics. There's no indication of what makes a "top" startup or what constitutes "interesting," let alone "revolutionary" work in the ed-tech space.
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The announcement on Tuesday that Massachusetts has qualified for $250 million in federal grant money under the Obama administration's "Race to the Top" program would seem to validate the state Board of Education's unanimous decision in July to adopt the national standards program. The standards will dictate what students across the country will learn in English and math.Nevertheless, the board's decision still may prove a liability for Gov. Deval Patrick in his bid for re-election in November.
Nine other states will share more than $3 billion in grants in this second round of awards. Cape Cod schools look to gain almost $2 million -- all of which will be targeted toward improving pupil performance, particularly in schools where the student achievement gap is significant. It will provide funding to improve teacher training, overhaul failing schools, and will increase accountability by tying test results to teachers.
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Of the record $100 billion in federal education funds appropriated under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) in 2009, Congress and President Obama set aside $5 billion to be awarded at the discretion of the Secretary of Education to states, districts, and consortia that develop robust education reform plans. The $5 billon is broken down as follows:$4 billion - Race to the Top State Incentive Fund (individual states)
$650 million - Investing in Innovation or i3 Grants (local, regional collaborators)
$350 million - Race to the Top Assessment Grants (multi-state consortia)
In total, these funds represent less than 1% of the $600 billion (federal, state, and local funds) spent on U.S. public elementary and secondary schools.
This unprecedented infusion of federal education reform funds, coupled with unprecedented latitude afforded to a U.S. Secretary of Education, catapulted the Obama Administration to the role of top U.S. venture philanthropist in the education policy world.
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Indianapolis Business Journal:
Tony Bennett, the state's superintendent of public instruction for nearly two years, deserves accolades for shoving education reform toward the top of Indiana's agenda.Unlike his predecessor, Suellen Reed, who seemed little more than a cheerleader for schools, Bennett is pushing hard-nosed reforms.
And while at times he's unfairly cast the state's powerful teachers' union--the Indiana State Teachers Association--as a villain, Bennett wisely struck a more productive, collaborative tone during his State of Education address Aug. 23. The New Albany Republican avoided the rhetoric that scores political points but does little to actually improve schools.
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Half the A-levels taken by pupils at independent schools in the UK were graded A or A* this year, according to figures from the sector.Almost one in five was awarded the new A* grade, says the Independent Schools Council, which represents the majority of independent schools in the UK.
Across state and private schools as a whole, 8% of A-level entries were graded A*, with 27% getting an A or A*.
About 6.5% of UK pupils go to private schools, rising to 18% among over-16s.
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Heidi Ramirez does not drink alcohol, except for one shot a year of bourbon in honor of President Harry Truman.Truman, she says, was a great president, and he had a shot of bourbon every day. But obviously that's not the whole story.
Ramirez grew up in a large, low-income family in Amsterdam, a small city northwest of Albany, N.Y. She made it to Syracuse University, and won a prestigious Truman Scholarship, a program that is aimed at college juniors "with exceptional leadership potential" and an interest in public service.
So, a toast once a year to Truman. The scholarship paved the way for her to go on to Harvard, Stanford and jobs in which she worked with some of the most influential people in American education.
And then she came to Milwaukee, where, at 36 and with no experience teaching or administering a school, she immediately became one of the most influential people on the local education scene. She is chief academic officer of Milwaukee Public Schools, one of several outsiders brought into MPS this summer by new Superintendent Gregory Thornton.
If MPS' education problems could be solved by personal energy, we already would have everything licked. Thornton is an energetic person and Ramirez, if anything, surpasses him. She is so hard-driving, yet cheerful about what she is doing, that some people tell her she sounds giddy about her job. "I really am," she admits. "I feel so incredibly blessed to be part of the work. . . . I get to do work that I love and that I think really matters."
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Cortines wants the method based on student test scores to count for at least 30% of instructor evaluations. But the teachers union must consent.Revamping teacher evaluations with the goal of helping instructors improve has become an urgent priority in the nation's second-largest school district, Ramon C. Cortines, superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, said in an address to administrators Wednesday.
Cortines said the district will develop and adopt a "value added" method that determines teachers' and schools' effectiveness based on student test scores. And he told a packed Hollywood High School auditorium that he's committed to using these ratings for at least 30% of a teacher's evaluation. The plan would require the consent of the teachers union.
In a later interview, Cortines also said he was disappointed that California lost its bid Tuesday for $700 million in federal Race to the Top school improvement grants. L.A. Unified's share would have been $153 million.
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There is an old myth that vampires cannot be seen in a mirror. A vampire has no real substance, the story goes, so light simply travels through him, rather than bouncing back and creating a reflection. That myth came to mind when Tim Daly of the New Teacher Project recently asked "who's a member of the 'blame the teacher' crowd?" and could not find a single person. Apparently Daly cannot see himself in a mirror.If there was ever a question about the existence of the 'blame the teacher' crowd, it was surely put to rest by the response of many in the self-identified 'education reform' community to the prospect of a wave of teacher layoffs as schools re-opened for the 2010-11 school year. Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Foundation, Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, Wal-Mart Professor of Education Reform Jay Greene: the blogging boys of the educational right have told all who would listen that the education funding crisis and the prospect of massive layoffs was a good thing, and that the passage of the edu-jobs legislation mitigating those layoffs was the real disaster. With Lenin, they embrace the formula "better fewer, but better": public schools would be better off with fewer teachers. After all, what do teachers have to do with the education of students?
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Consider it a new version of death by PowerPoint. The NATO command in Afghanistan has fired a staff officer who publicly criticized its interminable briefings, its overreliance on Microsoft's slideshow program, and what he considered its crushing bureaucracy.Army Colonel Lawrence Sellin, a 61-year old reservist from New Jersey who served in Afghanistan and Iraq prior to this deployment, got the sack yesterday from his job as a staff officer at the International Security Assistance Force Joint Command in Kabul. It was barely 48 hours after United Press International ran a passionate op-ed he wrote to lament that "little of substance is really done here." He tells Danger Room, "I feel quite rather alone here at the moment."
The colonel's rant called into question whether ISAF's revamped command structure, charged with coordinating the day-by-day war effort, was much more than a briefing factory. Or, as Sellin put it, "endless tinkering with PowerPoint slides to conform with the idiosyncrasies of cognitively challenged generals in order to spoon-feed them information." According to Sellin, when his commanding general (whom he doesn't want to name) saw that Sellin described IJC as a blinkered bureaucracy, he informed the colonel that it was time to pack his things. "He was very polite and shook my hand and wished me luck," Sellin says.
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Economists have discovered that the earning gap for college is even bigger because students are studying far less than previous generations. Midmorning asks if students are coming to college better prepared, or if the schools are complicit in lowering standards?
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Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey has fired his education commissioner, Bret D. Schundler, in the midst of a controversy over the state's failure to win a $400 million education grant, the governor's office announced Friday.Fascinating. Administrative accountability.A clerical mistake in the state's grant application had led the state to come up short by just three points in the high-stakes competition, known as Race to the Top. Mr. Christie had defended his administration's actions on Wednesday, in part by insisting that Mr. Schundler had provided the correct information to federal reviewers in an interview two weeks ago.
But federal officials released a video on Thursday showing that Mr. Schundler and his administration had not provided the information when asked. Mr. Christie, asked later Thursday about the videotape in a radio interview, said he would be seriously disappointed if it turned out he had been misled.
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JOE WILLIAMSRelated: John Nichols notes that Madison Teachers, Inc. endorsed Ben Manski in the 77th District Wisconsin Assembly
Executive Director
Invites you to a reception honoring three emerging education reform leaders:State Senator Lena Taylor
4th Senate DistrictAngel Sanchez
Candidate for the 8th Assembly District
Stephanie Findley
Candidate for the 10th Assembly District
These candidates have committed to support all children in all Milwaukee schools. Please help us show them that education reform supporters in Milwaukee recognize their efforts. With your help we can elect and re-elect committed leaders who will fight for real reform and support more quality options for children and their parents.Please join us whether you can give $5, $50 or $500 to each candidate!
When: Monday August 30th, 2010
Where: The Capital Grille
310 West Wisconsin Avenue
Time: 5:00 pm-7:00 pm
Refreshments will be served.
Free Valet Parking Provided.
RSVP: Ptosha Davis, DFER WI, 414-630-6637 or dferwisconsin@gmail.com
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Canada's point is that the only way to fix our schools is not with a Superman or a super-theory. No, it's with supermen and superwomen pushing super-hard to assemble what we know works: better-trained teachers working with the best methods under the best principals supported by more involved parents.Every parent and taxpayer should see this film."One of the saddest days of my life was when my mother told me Superman did not exist," Canada says in the film. "I read comic books and I just loved 'em ...'cause even in the depths of the ghetto you just thought, 'He's coming, I just don't know when, because he always shows up and he saves all the good people.' "
Then when he was in fourth or fifth grade, he asked, "Ma, do you think Superman is actually [real]?" She told him the truth: " 'Superman is not real.' I was like: 'He's not? What do you mean he's not?' 'No, he's not real.' And she thought I was crying because it's like Santa Claus is not real. And I was crying because there was no one ... coming with enough power to save us."
"Waiting for Superman" follows five kids and their parents who aspire to obtain a decent public education but have to enter a bingo-like lottery to get into a good charter school, because their home schools are miserable failures.
Guggenheim kicks off the film explaining that he was all for sending kids to their local public schools until "it was time to choose a school for my own children, and then reality set in. My feelings about public education didn't matter as much as my fear of sending them to a failing school. And so every morning, betraying the ideals I thought I lived by, I drive past three public schools as I take my kids to a private school. But I'm lucky. I have a choice. Other families pin their hopes to a bouncing ball, a hand pulling a card from a box or a computer that generates numbers in random sequence. Because when there's a great public school there aren't enough spaces, and so we do what's fair. We place our children and their future in the hands of luck."
It is intolerable that in America today a bouncing bingo ball should determine a kid's educational future, especially when there are plenty of schools that work and even more that are getting better. This movie is about the people trying to change that. The film's core thesis is that for too long our public school system was built to serve adults, not kids. For too long we underpaid and undervalued our teachers and compensated them instead by giving them union perks. Over decades, though, those perks accumulated to prevent reform in too many districts. The best ones are now reforming, and the worst are facing challenges from charters.
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California's community colleges have dropped a controversial plan that would have allowed their students to take some courses at the online Kaplan University and make it easier to transfer to that school for a bachelor's degree.State community college officials Wednesday said they had canceled a 2009 agreement with Kaplan, a for-profit institution, because the University of California and Cal State University systems had not agreed to accept Kaplan courses for transfer credits. Without the transfer agreements, the plan could have harmed students and the community colleges, the officials said.
Kaplan University officials, in a statement Wednesday, said they were disappointed by the decision but "will continue to foster relationships with California community colleges and to look for innovative ways to help students meet their academic and career goals."
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I am a mother of four children, two of whom are enrolled in Wisconsin Connections Academy, the state's public K-8 virtual school. My decision to do this was based on a number of factors. My oldest son, 6, is very bright and thoughtful, but has always had difficulty in social situations. He is easily overwhelmed by crowds and tends to withdraw, and I knew he would need help and extra attention to succeed in kindergarten and beyond. My daughter, 11, had been in the public school system from the beginning and was struggling as well. I knew that she was not getting the help she needed to keep up in math, for example. Also, the social stresses at school were affecting her self-esteem, and she was losing her desire to challenge herself. I began looking into virtual schools.I have been a long-time supporter of public schools and a fierce advocate for involving parents as partners in education. Yet I also came to realize that bricks-and-mortar schools could only go so far toward individualized education. Virtual schools, like WCA, provide the perfect opportunity for children to receive personalized education. WCA provides a public school education using state-certified teachers who work directly with learning coaches to bring personalized instruction.
It is schooling at home, not home-schooling. While they sound similar, there is a huge difference. With WCA, I am the learning coach for my children, but they learn a state-certified curriculum, just like kids in bricks-and-mortar schools. They have desks, books and computers. We even have a Smart Board in our basement that we use on a regular basis. We go on field trips and have opportunities to meet other families who have similar stories about how they came to WCA.
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It is, of course, essential that Oregon ensure the rigor and quality of online charter schools and demand financial and academic transparency from the private vendors operating these "virtual schools." But once the state is convinced that online students are receiving a quality education, why should it prevent other families from making the same choice?The Oregon Board of Education recently spent several hours kicking this question around before concluding that parents should be allowed to choose online schools -- but only up to a point. A majority of board members supported parent choice only if there was a cap on how many students could leave an individual school district. In other words, parent choice for some, but not necessarily all.
We understand the issue: State money follows students, and in theory enough students might bail out of an individual school district that it would leave that district too financially weakened to serve its remaining students.
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It's the start of another school year, and parents everywhere are asking themselves: Is my child's teacher any good? The Los Angeles Times recently attempted to answer that question for parents. Using a statistical technique known as "value added"--which estimates the contribution that a teacher made to a student's test-score gains from the beginning to the end of the school year--the paper analyzed the influence of third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade teachers on the math and reading scores of students in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The results suggest a wide variation in the quality of L.A.'s teachers. The paper promises a series of stories on this issue over the next several months.The Times has admirably highlighted the importance of using data to evaluate teacher performance, confirming the findings of a wide and growing body of research. Studies show that the difference between a student's being assigned to a good or bad teacher can mean as much as a grade level's worth of learning over the course of a school year. While parents probably don't need studies to tell them who the best teachers are--such information is an open secret in most public schools--academic research helps underscore the inadequacy of the methods currently used to evaluate teacher performance. Even the nation's lowest-performing school districts routinely rate more than 95 percent of their teachers as satisfactory or higher.
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When I'm not blogging away about technology for the Bits Blog, I'm also an adjunct professor at New York University in the Interactive Telecommunications Program.The program is a technology-focused graduate course, so it came as no surprise when four of my students walked into class in early April with fancy new Apple iPads in hand. After the students got past the novelty factor, a debate ensued about how the iPad would fit into their school life. One factor the students discussed was the ability to carry less "stuff" in their backpacks: the iPad can replace magazines, notepads, even a laptop.
Now there's an iPad application that could further lighten the load. A new company called Inkling hopes to break the standard textbook model and help textbooks enter the interactive age by letting students share and comment on the texts and interact with fellow students.
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WXYZ:
A new report by Excellent Schools Detroit is highlighting the best and worst Detroit's schools.The report is a report card of sorts about almost every school in the city. It ranks the schools from best to worst based on MEAP test results for elementary and middle schools and ACT results for high schools.
The report is meant to be used as a guide for parents who want to find the best school for their children. The authors recommend parents examine the data on their child's current schools and then look at the data from other schools that they could attend.
Among the best elementary schools in Detroit are the private Cornerstone School - Nevada Primary and Martin Luther King Jr. Education Center Academy, a charter school. Also included are the Bates Academy and Chrysler, both of which have special admissions requirements.
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When I get into cocktail-party conversation about language and politics, someone inevitably says "and of course there's the rise of China." It seems like any conversation these days has to work in the rise-of-China angle. Technology is changing society? Well, it's the flood of cheap tech from China. Worried about your job? It's the rise of China. Terrified of nuclear Iran? If only that rising China would stop resisting sanctions. What's for lunch? Well, we'd all better develop a taste for Chinese food.
I was reminded of this walking down New York's Park Avenue last night, when I saw a pre-school offering immersion courses in French, Italian, Spanish and Chinese. For years now, we've been seeing stories like this: Manhattan parents, always eager to steal some advantage for their children, are hiring Mandarin-speaking nannies, so their children can learn what some see as the language of the future.
But while China's rise is real, Chinese is in no way rising at the same rate. Yes, Mandarin Chinese is the world's most commonly spoken language, if you simply count the number of speakers. But the rub is that they're almost all in China. Yes, we've also read that Mandarin is advancing in Hong Kong, Taiwan and overseas Chinese communities (which have traditionally spoken one of China's other languages, such as Cantonese). And China is trying to expand the use of the language through the expansion of its overseas Confucius Institutes. But English remains the world's most important language. America's superpower status has made it everyone's favourite second language. This is where its power lies. A Japanese businessman does deals in Sweden in English. A German airline pilot landing in Milan speaks English to the tower. English is also the language of writing intended for an international audience, whether scientific, commercial or literary.
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I had the craziest dream last night, Louisiana, a state that is a leader on all the things that the administration says are priorities didn’t get Race to the Top funding…oh wait…
Anyway, New York never disappoints, the Patterson presser is one for the ages. ‘Race to the cock?’ What the hell?
Big takeaways beyond the RTT issues below, are that the odds of seeing consistent and deep change across all Race to the Top winners got a lot longer with this round of selections. But the two fundamental questions basically remain the same and can’t be answered yet: How durable will the many RTT-inspired policy changes prove to be and will those changes actually improve student learning?
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Earlier this year Massachusetts enacted a law that allowed districts to remove at least half the teachers and the principal at their lowest-performing schools. The school turnaround legislation aligned the state with the Obama administration's Race to the Top program incentives and a chance to collect a piece of the $3.4 billion in federal grant money.From Washington this makes abundant good sense, a way to galvanize rapid and substantial change in schools for children who need it most.
In practice, on the ground, it is messy for the people most necessary for turning a school around -- the teachers -- and not always fair.
Often the decisions about which teachers will stay and which will go are made by new principals who may be very good, but don't know the old staff. "We had several good teachers asked to leave," said Heather Gorman, a fourth-grade teacher who will be staying at Blackstone Elementary here, where 38 of 50 teachers were removed. "Including my sister who's been a special-ed teacher 22 years."
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Here at GeekDad we are fortunate to spend time reviewing and exploring the increasing number of applications design to entertain, educate and amuse our children. The sudden rise in accessible touch technology through smartphones and tablets combined with the business model provided through App Stores to developers has turned application development into a modern day equivalent of a gold rush. Everyone is out there, developing apps as quickly as possible - hoping to strike it rich with a well designed flatulence application - and consequently flooding the market with sub-standard applications that see them back up their tent and leave the electronic frontier as quickly as they came.Consequently, there are a lot of apps for kids that are not well thought through, not developmentally appropriate, or simply way too generic! And, in my professional life and personal life having reviewed and played a lot of these games I think it is time to ask developers to start focusing on quality, rather than quantity.
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Four months ago, Jamila Best was still in college. Two months ago, she started training to become a teacher. Monday morning, the 21-year-old will walk into a D.C. classroom, take a deep breath and dive into one of the most difficult assignments in public education.Best is one of 4,500 Teach for America recruits placed in public schools this year after five weeks of summer preparation. The quickly expanding organization says that the fast track enables talented young instructors to be matched with schools that badly need them -- and the Obama administration agrees. This month, Teach for America won a $50 million federal grant that will help the program nearly double in the next four years.
But many educators and experts question the premise that teaching is best learned on the job and doesn't require extensive study beforehand. They wonder how Best and her peers will handle tough situations they will soon face. Best, with a Howard University degree in sociology and psychology, will teach students with disabilities at Cesar Chavez Parkside Middle School in Northeast Washington. She has none of the standard credentials for special education.
"I'm ready to go," Best said last week at the public charter school as she put finishing touches on her lesson plans. "The challenges will come."
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The Chicago Teachers Union on Tuesday accused Mayor Daley's handpicked school team of hiring "baby sitters" to provide "education on the cheap" -- online, after-school classes in reading and math that will extend one of the nation's shortest school days for 5,500 students.Virtual learning is an important and desirable part of the K-12 world."When the kids are tired and they want to go home and they don't want to do this any more, what happens? I'm a little concerned about how this plays out over an entire year," said union president Karen Lewis.
At a news conference at Walsh Elementary School, 2015 S. Peoria, Daley acknowledged that "some parents and teachers will not support" his efforts to use computerized learning to extend the school day.
But he argued that an extra 90 minutes a day would add up to 255 more hours a year. That's a 25 percent increase in a school day that pales by comparison to other major cities, he said.
"This is all about children and not about adults. . . . Education doesn't end at 2:45" p.m., the mayor said.
Schools CEO Ron Huberman added, "All of our efforts to expand the school day with the traditional work force were, unfortunately, rejected. This has been the mayor's push to say, 'Despite constraints, we must find a way to do this.' "
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Anna Fifield; video:
Arne Duncan, US education secretary, tells Anna Fifield, the FT's US political correspondent, that the "Race to the Top" programme has led to a "quiet revolution" with 36 hard-up states implementing reforms simply in the hope of receiving federal funding. Despite opposition from teachers' unions, Mr Duncan says the administration will continue to push for change, although it will not raise the proportion of education funding that comes from the federal government.
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A report released Tuesday ranks cities not in terms of best-performing schools but on their openness to outside ideas and education reform.Complete Study: 9.9MB PDF:Education entrepreneurs - the sort of people who want to open a new charter school, or have an innovative way to get talented new teachers into schools - would do well to head to New Orleans. Or Washington or New York.
At least that's the judgment of "America's Best (and Worst) Cities for School Reform: Attracting Entrepreneurs and Change Agents," a study released Tuesday that's attempting to rank cities in a new way. It doesn't look at how well their students perform, or even on the programs their districts have put in place, but on how welcoming they are to reforms and new ideas. The education version of the World Bank's annual ranking of the best countries for business, if you will.
Enter the education entrepreneur, a problem-solver who has developed a different and--it is to be hoped--better approach to teaching and learning, either inside or outside the traditional school system. He or she may provide, among other things, a novel form of brick and mortar teaching, an alternative version of teacher recruitment or training, or time-saving software and tools that make for more efficient instruction and surer learning. Which cities would welcome and support such problem-solvers by helping to bring their ideas to scale, improve their odds of success, and nurture their growth? Put another way, which cities have the most reform-friendly ecosystems?
To answer this question, analysts examined six domains that shape a jurisdiction's receptivity to education reform:Human Capital: Entrepreneurs need access to a ready flow of talented individuals, whether to staff their own operations or fill the district's classrooms.
Financial Capital: A pipeline of flexible funding from private and/or public sources is vital for nonprofit organizations trying to break into a new market or scale up their operations.
Charter Environment: Charter schools are one of the primary entrees through which entrepreneurs can penetrate new markets, both as direct education providers and as consumers of other nontraditional goods and services.
Quality Control: Lest we unduly credit innovation per se, the study takes into account the quality- control metrics that appraise and guide entrepreneurial ventures.
District Environment: Because many nontraditional providers must contract with the district in order to work in the city, finding a district that is both open to nontraditional reforms and has the organiza- tional capacity to deal with them in a speedy and professional manner can make or break an entrepreneur's foray into a new market.
Municipal Environment: Beyond the school district, is the broader community open to, even eager for, nontraditional providers? Consider, for example, the stance of business leaders, the mayor, and the media.
Drawing on publicly available data, national and local survey data, and interviews with on-the-ground insiders, analysts devised a grading metric that rated each city on its individual and collective accom- plishments in each of these areas.
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I have just returned from giving a three-day workshop on student history research papers for English and Social Studies teachers, both high school and middle school, in Collier Country, Florida.
They assessed and discussed four high school student research papers using the procedures of the National Writing Board. We went over some of the consequences for a million of our students each year who graduate from high school and are required to take (and pay for) non-credit remedial courses when they get to college.
I talked to them about the advantages students have if they have written a serious paper, like the International Baccalaureate Extended Essay, in high school, and the difficulties with both reading nonfiction books and writing term papers which students (and college graduates) have if they have not been asked to do those tasks in high school.
It was a diligent, pleasant and interesting group of teachers, and I was glad to have had the chance to meet with them for a few days. They seemed genuinely interested in having their students do serious papers and be better prepared for college (and career).
At lunch on the last day, however, I discovered that Florida is a "right to work" state, and that their local union is rather weak, so they each have six classes of 30 or more students (180 students). One teacher is being asked to teach seven classes this year, with 30 or more students in each (210).
After absorbing the fact of this shameful and irresponsible number of assigned students, I realized that if these teachers were to ask for the 20-page history research paper which is typical of the ones I publish in The Concord Review, they would have 3,600 pages to read, correct, and comment on when they were turned in, not to mention the extra hours guiding students through their research and writing efforts. The one teacher with 210 students would have 4,200 pages of papers presented to him at the end of term.
It made me both sad and angry that these willing teachers, who want their students to be prepared for higher education, have been given impossible working conditions which will most certainly prevent them from helping their students get ready for the academic reading and writing tasks which await them in college (and career).
The Washington Post
theanswersheet.com
25 August 2010
Valerie Strauss
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Few education stories have excited me as much as the series on teacher assessment being done by reporters Jason Song, Jason Felch and Doug Smith of the Los Angeles Times. They have dug up a goldmine of data on the student test score gains of 6,000 individual elementary school teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District, information that the district has refused to show to parents despite pleas from its staff to do so.The latest story in the series, "L.A.'s leaders in learning," does many things that I think are crucial to improving American education, and fit what I have been trying to do calculating the level of challenge in high schools, nationally and in the Washington area, the last 12 years.
The latest Times story focuses on how schools as a whole, not individual teachers, are doing in raising achievement. That emphasis encourages schools to create team-like cultures in which everyone works to make everyone else better. The story buttresses the central point of the series--that schools that seem similar to parents trying to choose where to send their children look very different when unreported data like relative test score gains are revealed. It also shows in a dramatic way the uselessness of our usual means of rating schools. Those that have the highest test scores are considered the best, even though achievement measured that way reflects the average incomes of the parents far more than it does the quality of the teaching.
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Secretary of Education Arne Duncan set an ambitious goal last year of overhauling 1,000 schools a year, using billions of dollars in federal stimulus money.But that effort is off to an uneven start. Schools from Maine to California are starting the fall term with their overhaul plans postponed or in doubt because negotiations among federal regulators, state officials and local educators have led to delays and confusion.
In this sprawling district east of Los Angeles, for example, the authorities announced plans earlier this year to use the program to convert Pacific High, one of California's worst-performing schools, to a charter school, involving a comprehensive makeover.
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American writer Nicholas Carr's claim that the internet is not only shaping our lives but physically altering our brains has sparked a lively and ongoing debate, says John Naughton. Below, a selection of writers and experts offer their opinionEvery 50 years or so, American magazine the Atlantic lobs an intellectual grenade into our culture. In the summer of 1945, for example, it published an essay by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) engineer Vannevar Bush entitled "As We May Think". It turned out to be the blueprint for what eventually emerged as the world wide web. Two summers ago, the Atlantic published an essay by Nicholas Carr, one of the blogosphere's most prominent (and thoughtful) contrarians, under the headline "Is Google Making Us Stupid?".
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Why would you study design if you weren't planning to become a designer? Especially if you were a high school student in a depressed rural area of the United States, like Bertie County, one of the poorest counties in North Carolina, where 80 percent of students live in poverty, and your best chance of employment will be a low-skilled job in agriculture or biotechnology.Why indeed? Yet all 16 teenagers in the 11th grade at the School of Agriscience and Biotechnology at the Bertie Early College High School have committed to attending an experimental design course, Studio H, for three hours every day in the new school year. An abandoned car body shop behind the school has been converted into a classroom, studio and workshop for the course. By the end of it, the students will have designed a community project, a farmers' market to sell locally gown produce, and will then be paid to build it over the summer.
Because of Bertie County's poverty, "very few of these kids will become designers," said Emily Pilloton, founder of the humanitarian design group, Project H, who recently moved to Bertie County from San Francisco to run Studio H with Project H's project architect, Matthew Miller.
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So most of you may have heard that the LA Times is doing a huge multi-part story about teacher evaluation. One of the biggest parts is a listing of every single public school teacher and their classroom test scores (and the teachers are called out by name).Though the government spends billions of dollars every year on education, relatively little of the money has gone to figuring out which teachers are effective and why.Interestingly, the LA Times apparently had access to more than 50 elementary school classrooms. (Yes, I know it's public school but man, you can get pushback as a parent to sit in on a class so I'm amazed they got into so many.) And guess what, these journalists, who may or may not have ever attended a public school or have kids, made these observations:
Seeking to shed light on the problem, The Times obtained seven years of math and English test scores from the Los Angeles Unified School District and used the information to estimate the effectiveness of L.A. teachers -- something the district could do but has not.The Times used a statistical approach known as value-added analysis, which rates teachers based on their students' progress on standardized tests from year to year. Each student's performance is compared with his or her own in past years, which largely controls for outside influences often blamed for academic failure: poverty, prior learning and other factors.
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Here on Jeju Island, famous for its tangerine groves, pearly beaches and honeymoon resorts, South Korea is conducting a bold educational experiment, one intended to bolster opportunity at home and attract investment from abroad.By 2015, if all goes according to plan, 12 prestigious Western schools will have opened branch campuses in a government-financed, 940-acre Jeju Global Education City, a self-contained community within Seogwipo, where everyone -- students, teachers, administrators, doctors, store clerks -- will speak only English. The first school, North London Collegiate, broke ground for its campus this month.
While this is the country's first enclave constructed expressly around foreign-style education, individual campuses are opening elsewhere. Dulwich College, a private British school, is scheduled to open a branch in Seoul, the capital, in a few weeks. And the Chadwick School of California is set to open a branch in Songdo, a new town rising west of Seoul, around the same time.
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Since Andie was in 6th grade - she'll be entering 8th grade Sept. 1 - the Smith family has used Infinite Campus, an electronic data system that gives parents access to information about how students are doing in school. It often provides more information than the typical middle school student brings home and it helps parents know from week-to-week what's going on in the classroom. Madison, like most other Dane County school districts, has been using some form of electronic communication system for the last several years.Much more on Infinite Campus and "Standards Based Report Cards", here."I don't have to ask to look at her planner anymore," says Smith. "And, her group of teachers at Toki wrote a weekly newsletter last year that I could read online. When your kids get into middle school, they've got more classes, and parents generally have fewer connections with the teachers so I really appreciate the way it works."
For the first time this year, Smith, like the rest of the parents and guardians of the approximately 24,000 students in the Madison Metropolitan School District, is using the online system to enroll her children in class. She also has a son, Sam, who will be a 5th grader at Chavez Elementary this fall. District officials hope that giving parents a password and user ID at the enrollment stage will expand the number of parents using Infinite Campus. A primary goal is to help increase communication ties between home and school, which is a proven way to engage kids and boost academic achievement.
But whether all parents will take to the system remains to be seen. Despite the boom in electronic communication, there are plenty of homes without computers, especially in urban school districts like Madison where poverty levels are rising. The extent to which teachers will buy in is also unclear. Teachers are required to post report cards and attendance online, but things like test scores, assignments and quizzes will be discretionary.
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147K PDF via a Dan Dempsey email:
The following abstract and conclusion is taken from:Related: Value Added Assessment, Standards Based Report Cards and Los Angeles's Value Added Teacher Data.
Volume 4, Issue 4 - Fall 2009 - Special Issue: Key Issues in Value-Added ModelingWould Accountability Based on Teacher Value Added Be Smart Policy? An Examination of the Statistical Properties and Policy Alternatives
Douglas N. Harris of University of Wisconsin Madison
Education Finance and Policy Fall 2009, Vol. 4, No. 4: 319-350.Available here:
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/edfp.2009.4.4.319Abstract
Annual student testing may make it possible to measure the contributions to student achievement made by individual teachers. But would these "teacher value added" measures help to improve student achievement? I consider the statistical validity, purposes, and costs of teacher value-added policies. Many of the key assumptions of teacher value added are rejected by empirical evidence. However, the assumption violations may not be severe, and value-added measures still seem to contain useful information. I also compare teacher value-added accountability with three main policy alternatives: teacher credentials, school value-added accountability, and formative uses of test data. I argue that using teacher value-added measures is likely to increase student achievement more efficiently than a teacher credentials-only strategy but may not be the most cost-effective policy overall. Resolving this issue will require a new research and policy agenda that goes beyond analysis of assumptions and statistical properties and focuses on the effects of actual policy alternatives.6. CONCLUSION
A great deal of attention has been paid recently to the statistical assumptions of VAMs, and many of the most important papers are contained in the present volume. The assumptions about the role of past achievement in affecting current achievement (Assumption No. 2) and the lack of variation in teacher effects across student types (Assumption No. 4) seem least problematic. However, unobserved differences are likely to be important, and it is unclear whether the student fixed effects models, or any other models, really account for them (Assumption No. 3). The test scale is also a problem and will likely remain so because the assumptions underlying the scales are untestable. There is relatively little evidence on how administration and teamwork affect teachers (Assumption No. 1).
Many notes and links on the Madison School District's student information system: Infinite Campus are here.
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If you have a child in college, or are planning to send one there soon, Craig Brandon has a message for you: Be afraid. Be very afraid."The Five-Year Party" provides the most vivid portrait of college life since Tom Wolfe's 2004 novel, "I Am Charlotte Simmons." The difference is that it isn't fiction. The alcohol-soaked, sex-saturated, drug-infested campuses that Mr. Brandon writes about are real. His book is a roadmap for parents on how to steer clear of the worst of them.
Many of the schools Mr. Brandon describes are education-free zones, where students' eternal obligations--do the assigned reading, participate in class, hand in assignments--no longer apply. The book's title refers to the fact that only 30% of students enrolled in liberal-arts colleges graduate in four years. Roughly 60% take at least six years to get their degrees. That may be fine with many schools, whose administrators see dollar signs in those extra semesters.
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Letters to the New York Times Editor
"Schools Given Grade on How Graduates Do" (front page, Aug. 10) was revealing of system failure on several levels.Especially telling for me were the comments by a remedial writing teacher at a community college who noted: "They don't know how to develop an argument. They have very little ability to get past rhetoric and critically analyze what is motivating the writer."
This teacher's observation highlights what may well be the school system's worst deficiency in terms of skills development: a failure to promote critical thinking. That skill is fundamental if our youth are to become thoughtful workers and thoughtful citizens of a democratic society rather than robots. Developing it can't be left to writing classes alone but must happen throughout the curriculum.
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he descendant of a slave is about to enter Mars Hill College, bringing to an end 105 years of segregation at the Baptist school in western North Carolina.* Her admittance means something more: the payoff of a novel moral debt.The founders of little Mars Hill were in trouble as soon as they laid the last handmade brick on the first building in 1856. They owed the contractors $1,100; the treasury was empty. While they frantically passed the hat, the builders slapped a judgment on the Rev. J. W. Anderson, future secretary of the college. The Rev. Mr. Anderson owned a Negro named Joe --a strapping young man easily worth $1,100 on the slave market in nearby Asheville. Some say that Joe himself volunteered to be a human surety. The builders took him to jail for safekeeping. Four days later, when the founders raised the cash. Mars Hill was saved.
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So you want to know if the teacher your child has for the new school year is the star you're hoping for. How do you find out?Related: Value added assessment.Well, you can ask around. Often even grade school kids will give you the word. But what you hear informally might be on the mark and might be baloney. Isn't there some way to get a good answer?
Um, not really. You want a handle on how your kid is doing, there's plenty of data. You want information on students in the school or the school district, no problem.
But teachers? If they had meaningful evaluation reports, the reports would be confidential. And you can be quite confident they don't have evaluations like that - across the U.S., and certainly in Wisconsin, the large majority of teachers get superficial and almost always favorable evaluations based on brief visits by an administrator to their classrooms, research shows. The evaluations are of almost no use in actually guiding teachers to improve.
Perhaps you could move to Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times began running a project last Sunday on teachers and the progress students made while in their classes. It named a few names and said it will unveil in coming weeks specific data on thousands of teachers.
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Katharine Beals, Trumpeter Books, 2009 Reviewed by Barry Garelick, via email
Many school parents question the value of today's homework assignments. They rightly wonder whether their children are getting the education they need in order to succeed in college. For the most part, they are well-meaning parents who were educated from the 1950's through the 1970's in a different style--a style derided by the current power elite in graduate schools of education and school administration. They describe the schoolroom remembered by today's parents as: sitting in rows, facing front, listening passively to a teacher who talked to the blackboard, "memorizing by rote", and thinking uncritically. In today's classrooms, students are given a minimal amount of instruction, and instead are presented with a question--say a math problem--told to form groups and work out an approach to solving the problem. Or if not a math problem, they are told to discuss an aspect of a book they are reading. Homework assignments are often art projects, in which students must construct dioramas of the climactic event of a story they read, or decorate a tissue box with German phrases to help them learn the language, or put together a family tree with photographs and label each with the Spanish term for their place in the family.In Raising a Left-brain Child in a Right-brain World, Katharine Beals explores today's classrooms and describes in detail why this approach is particularly destructive and ineffective for students who are shy, awkward, introspective, linear and analytic thinkers. She is careful to explain that her use of the term "left brained" is her way of categorizing students who are linear thinkers--who process information by learning one thing at a time thoroughly before moving on to the next. (I use the term in the same fashion in this review.)
A particularly powerful passage at the beginning of the book describes the difficulties that left-brained children face and provides a stark and disturbing contrast with the traditional classrooms that the parents of these children remember:
Making matters worse is how today's informal discussions favor multiple solutions, personal opinions, and personal connections over single correct answers. In previous generations the best answer, exerting an absolute veto power, favored the studious over the merely charismatic; how that there is no best answer, extroversion is king. ... To fully appreciate the degree to which today's classrooms challenge our children, we should consider how they might have fared in more traditional schools. Imagine how much more at ease they might be in general, and how their attitudes toward school might improve, if they enjoyed the privacy of quietly listening to teachers lecture instead of having to talk to classmates. ...Imagine if they could read to themselves instead of to a group, do math problems on their own, and find, in the classroom, a safe haven from school yard dynamics. (p. 23)
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My print column this week examines the debate over so-called value-added measures for teachers, which evaluate their performance based on how much they improve their students' standardized test scores.Douglas Harris, associate professor of educational policy and public affairs at the University of Wisconsin, is a cautious advocate of these measures, but points out that concerns about teaching to the test could be heightened if teachers, as well as principals and school districts, are evaluated based on test results. "Teacher can generate high value-added measures by drilling the test over and over," Harris said.
If these measures catch on, they could also encourage more teachers to cheat. "If we start to place a lot of weight on these things, [you] have to expect some degree of malfeasance," said Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. "You want the benefits to outweigh the costs, and you want to police it in a smart way."
Will the benefits outweigh the costs? "That's the big unknown," Michael Hansen, a researcher in the Urban Institute's Education Policy Center in Washington, D.C., wrote in an email. "What is known is that the way most districts currently hire, evaluate, and pay teachers is misaligned with the public goal of increasing overall student learning."
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Fewer than one percent of Oregon students are enrolled in online public schools. But for nearly five years, the funding, quality and financial management of these virtual schools have been dominating conversation in State Capitol hearing rooms and school district board rooms.In Oregon, education dollars follow the students. And this issue pits parent choice against school district stability.
Initially, each of six members of the state board suggested slightly different solutions. After nearly three hours of discussion, however, most board members said they would support parent choice but only if there was a cap on how many students could leave an individual school district.
"Parents should have the option to transfer," said board chairwoman Brenda Frank. "I don't believe the district has all the answers. But I think there just needs to be a gate."
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Georgia Families for Public Virtual Education
It has been said that victory is sweetest when you've known defeat. Yesterday's Commission ruling sure felt sweet! Thanks to the energized efforts of Georgia parents, school choice reigns supreme for our 9th grade students. The state school board ruled 8-2 in favor of adding ninth grade to the Georgia Cyber Academy. This decision allowed 660 GCA ninth graders to begin classes on September 7.Related: Madison's 2009-2010 budget was $370,287,471, according to the Citizen's Budget, spending $15,241 per student (24,295 students)..The Atlanta Journal Constitution's Aileen Dodd was there to cover the story live. She writes, "After the outcries of parents and the embarrassment of having two approved cyber schools call off August openings, leaders of the Georgia Charter Schools Commission admitted that they may have low-balled the cost of virtual public education. The board has agreed to rethink its figures."
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The premise of this book is enticingly simple . It presents two solutions to two prevalent problems in education . The first is the vast amount of content required to be taught because of various state standards, and how one can thread that maze and "teach for understanding ." That is, how can educators get students to apply what they've learned to new and unfamiliar problems? The second is the diverse nature of today's classrooms, the result of heterogeneous grouping of students of different abilities . How does an educator differentiate instruction to accommodate such diversity in a single classroom?I read this book in a math teaching methods class a few years ago . One event in that class stands out regarding this textbook . In a chapter on assessing understanding, a chart presents examples of "Inauthentic versus Authentic Work" (p . 68) . For example, "Solve contrived problems" is listed as inauthentic; "Solve 'real world' prob- lems" is listed as authentic . The black-and-white nature of the dis- tinctions on the chart bothered me, so when the teacher asked if we had any comments, I said that calling certain practices "inauthentic" is not only pejorative but misleading . Since the chart listed "Practice decontextualized skills" as inauthentic and "Interpret literature" as authentic, I asked the teacher, "Do you really think that learning to read is an inauthentic skill?"
She replied that she didn't really know about issues related to reading . Keeping it on the math level, I then asked why the authors automatically assumed that a word problem that might be contrived didn't involve "authentic" mathematical concepts . She answered with a blank stare and the words "Let's move on ."
That incident remains in my mind because it is emblematic of the educational doctrine that pervades schools of education as well as this book . The doctrine holds that mastery of facts and attaining procedural fluency in subjects like mathematics amounts to mind- numbing "drill and kill" exercises that ultimately stifle creativity and critical thinking . It also embodies the belief that critical thinking skills can be taught .
In a discussion of what constitutes "understanding," the authors state that a student's ability to apply what he or she has learned does not necessarily represent understanding . "When we call for an appli- cation we do not mean a mechanical response or mindless 'plug-in' of a memorized formula . Rather, we ask students to transfer--to use what they know in a new situation" (p . 67) . In terms of math and other subjects that involve attaining procedural fluency, employing worked examples as scaffolding for tackling more-complex prob- lems is not something that these authors see as leading to any kind of understanding . That a mastery of fundamentals provides the foun- dation for the creativity they seek is lost in their quest to get stu- dents performing authentic work from the start
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The Los Angeles Unified School District will ask labor unions to adopt a new approach to teacher evaluations that would judge instructors partly by their ability to raise students' test scores -- a sudden and fundamental change in how the nation's second-largest district assesses its educators.The teachers union has for years staunchly resisted using student test data in instructors' reviews.
The district's actions come in response to a Times article on teacher effectiveness. The article was based on an analysis, called "value-added," which measures teachers by analyzing their students' performance on standardized tests. The approach has been embraced by education reformers as a way to bring objectivity to teacher evaluations.
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Knowledge is power, but it is not always welcome. The Los Angeles Times just completed an extensive study of how individual teachers have fared at raising their students' math and English test scores in the state's most populous city. The raw data have been available to the L.A. Unified School District for years, but it never bothered to crunch those numbers, let alone share them with parents. The Times has pledged to publish its ratings of 6,000 elementary school instructors.Reaction of the local teachers union? It has called for a "massive boycott" of the Times.
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Local school districts have started to grade teachers based on student test scores, but the early results suggest the effort deserves an incomplete.Related: Standards Based Report Cards and Value Added Assessment.The new type of teacher evaluations make use of the standardized tests that have become an annual rite for American public-school students. The tests mainly have been used to measure the progress of students and schools, but with some statistical finesse they can be transformed into a lens for identifying which teachers are producing the best test results.
At least, that's the hope among some education experts. But the performance numbers that have emerged from these studies rely on a flawed statistical approach.
One perplexing finding: A large proportion of teachers who rate highly one year fall to the bottom of the charts the next year. For example, in a group of elementary-school math teachers who ranked in the top 20% in five Florida counties early last decade, more than three in five didn't stay in the top quintile the following year, according to a study published last year in the journal Education Finance and Policy.
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A tragic crisis of enormous magnitude is facing black boys and men in America.The complete PDF report can viewed here.Parental neglect, racial discrimination and an orgy of self-destructive behavior have left an extraordinary portion of the black male population in an ever-deepening pit of social and economic degradation.
The Schott Foundation for Public Education tells us in a new report that the on-time high school graduation rate for black males in 2008 was an abysmal 47 percent, and even worse in several major urban areas -- for example, 28 percent in New York City.
The astronomical jobless rates for black men in inner-city neighborhoods are both mind-boggling and heartbreaking. There are many areas where virtually no one has a legitimate job.
Related: They're all rich, white kids and they'll do just fine.
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The Madison School District, PDF:
Madison Metropolitan School District students received an average composite score on the ACT of 24.2, up slightly from the previous year's composite of 24.0. The scores were in line with a 16-year history of the district where results have ranged from 23.5 to 24.6 and average 24.2 in that period (see Table 1 below).Madison Edgewood High Schools' Composite ACT score was 25.4 (100% of Edgewood seniors took the ACT).As in previous years, MMSD students outperformed their peers in the state and the nation on the 2010 ACT. District students outscored their state peers by 2.1 points and their national peers by 3.2 points, scoring 10% higher and 15% higher respectively. The average ACT score for Wisconsin and the nation were 22.1, and 21.0, respectively.
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WRITING about the same analysis of Los Angeles public school teachers my colleague referenced yesterday, Matthew Yglesias points to the NAEP mathematics 8th-grade test rankings of different major-city public-school systems, which shows Los Angeles performing below average for black, hispanic, and Asian/Pacific Islander students, as well as for low-income students. Los Angeles did okay with middle-class white students. This reminded me of something I learned a couple of months ago: there are other, perhaps better ways of categorising students than race and income, for the purpose of deciding whether they are being well served by their schools. Specifically, parents' educational attainment. Taking parents' educational attainment as a baseline is a very effective way to measure whether a "good" school is really doing a standout job of educating its kids, or whether it's simply benefiting from a student population that has a head start.
This is largely how the Netherlands' educational inspectorate (Onderwijsinspectie) has been measuring student baselines for the purposes of evaluating schools since 2006. How they got to this measurement is an interesting story, as Helen Ladd and Edward Fiske of Duke University explain in this paper. First, starting 25 years ago the Dutch instituted a system of funding schools based on "weighting" students: students who came from backgrounds presumed to be educationally disadvantaged got more funding, and schools with large populations of "weighted" students ended up with more resources to try and make up the disparities. Initially, the high weights were given to children from immigrant backgrounds, or to children of poor native Dutch parents with very low educational attainment. But as Dutch politics became more right-wing in the 2000s, the idea of giving more funding to children of immigrants than to children of native Dutch parents became unpopular. Hence the idea of weighting children chiefly according to parents' educational attainment, which was amenable to both right- and left-wing parties: it still tends to weight children from immigrant backgrounds more heavily, unless their parents are wealthy, highly-educated immigrants, in which case they probably didn't need the extra help anyway. It also directs more resources to children of native Dutch parents from underprivileged backgrounds, and it defuses some of the racial tensions over school funding.
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The four digital titles-- McGraw-Hill Cos. best sellers in biology, economics, marketing, psychology--are expected to become available via the iTunes App Store beginning Friday. Prices will start at $2.99 per chapter and $69.99 for entire books, for a limited time. Thereafter, chapters will be $3.99 and books will start at $84.99.The Inkling-based e-books make full use of the iPad's color, video and touch screen. A biology text, for example, offers 3-D views of molecules such as DNA, video lectures, and interactive quizzes. Users can highlight text, take notes and share them in real time with other users, such as fellow students. Along the way, students can jump outside the text to Google or Wikipedia.
Inkling has struck deals with other large publishers, including John Wiley & Sons Inc. and Cengage Learning, to launch future titles.
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It is always news to me when I hear or read something good about the Newark school system, so I took notice when the Schott Foundation for Public Education released a new study saying that both that city, and the state of New Jersey, lead the nation in the percent of black male students graduating from high school.Schott's report focused on the abysmal national graduation rate for black males, only 47 percent in the 2007-08 school year, but it heralded the New Jersey results, and gave credit to that state's heavy spending and innovative measures to raise graduation rates for everyone.
It said New Jersey had a graduation rate for black males of 69 percent in 2007-08, with the next closest states being Maryland (55 percent), California (54 percent) and Pennsylvania (53 percent). In Newark, the graduation rate for black males was 76 percent. The other school districts nearest that level were Fort Bend, Tex. (68 percent), Baltimore County, Md. (67 percent) and Montgomery County, Md. (65 percent). The list only included states with more than 100,000 black male students and districts with more than 10,000 black male students.
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But Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, urges the L.A. Times not to publish a database showing how teachers may have influenced students' standardized test scores.The head of the American Federation of Teachers said Wednesday that she believed parents have a right to know how well their children's teachers are rated on employee evaluations, but strongly disagreed with The Times' decision to publish data showing how individual teachers may have influenced the standardized test scores of students.
Such data should be considered only as part of a well-rounded evaluation of a teacher's performance, Randi Weingarten said, and then should be available only to the teacher, his or her principal, and individual parents. It is wrong, she said, to make such information widely available to the public.
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A quarter-century ago, the nation was transfixed by this question: " Where's the beef?"Related: A deeper look at local National Merit Scholar Results.Now, the question we should be asking ourselves about our nation's schools is this: " Where's the rigor?" Or, "Where's the academic beef?"
Concerns about the lack of rigor in U.S. schools were renewed recently, when new data were published on how prepared - or not - U.S. high school students are for college. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Stephanie Banchero said, "New data show that fewer than 25% of 2010 graduates who took the ACT college-entrance exam possessed the academic skills necessary to pass entry-level [college] courses."
The story, as reported by many outlets, was that the average ACT score has fallen slightly since 2007. But the real story - and the one that Banchero focused on - is that the vast majority of our high school graduates aren't ready for college or a career. And this holds true even when they follow a supposedly "rigorous" course of study, taking four years of English and three years each of math, science and social studies.
It turns out that much of what U.S. schools offer is "rigorous" in name only. Said differently, a distinct lack of academic rigor is de rigueur.
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UW researchers have found that despite the spoken commitment of state officials and lawmakers, teachers in math and science earn less than other high-school instructors.Jim Simpkins, Marguerite Roza, Cristina SepeResearchers at the University of Washington have found that despite the spoken commitment of state officials and lawmakers, math and science teachers earn less than other high-school instructors.
The way Washington and many other states pay teachers -- with more money going to those with more years of experience and graduate degrees -- has led to the uneven salaries.
Jobs that pay better at nearby high-tech companies may also be a contributing factor, because math and science teachers may be recruited away before they have a chance to reach the higher rungs on the pay ladder, said Jim Simpkins, a researcher on the report, with Marguerite Roza and Cristina Sepe.
Washington State recently passed a law (House Bill 2621) intending to accelerate the teaching and learning of math and science. However, in the two subject areas the state seeks to prioritize, this analysis finds that nineteen of the thirty largest districts in the state spend less per math or science teacher than for teachers in other subjects.Existing salary schedules are part of the problem. By not allowing any differential compensation for math and science teachers, and instead basing compensation only on longevity and graduate credits, the wage system works to create the uneven salaries.
The analysis finds that in twenty-five of the thirty largest districts, math and science teachers had fewer years of teaching experience due to higher turnover--an indication that labor market forces do indeed vary with subject matter expertise. The subject-neutral salary schedule works to ignore these differences.
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Life expectancy at birth ranges from 80 years in Hawaii to 72 in Washington, DC; and from 83 in Japan to 40 in Swaziland. In vitro fertilisation is available in some regions of the UK within months; in others it takes years. Fill in your own example here, because it is now a commonplace that the price, availability and quality of anything from a nursing home to a good education will vary depending on where you live.Harford makes an excellent point. It is clearly futile to impose one size fits all approaches, particularly in education. We, as a society are far better off with a diverse governance (many smaller schools/districts/charters/vouchers) and curricular environment.I am not sure whether the British complain more about this than anyone else, but we have developed our own term to describe it: the "postcode lottery". For community-minded gamblers there is actually a real postcode lottery, in which prizes are shared between winning ticket-holders and those fortunate enough to have homes on the same street. But for most Britons, the term is a lazy shorthand for the fact that where you live affects what you get.
There is a glaring problem with this phrase: while the ticket that gets pulled out of the tombola is chosen at random, the postcodes where you and I live are not. We aren't serfs. If we want to move and we can afford to move, we can move.
I live in Hackney, a London borough where crime is high and the schools are poor. If I had a few spare million, perhaps I would move to Hampstead or Chelsea. I do not. People who shop at Harrods expect better food than those who shop at Tesco. Ferraris are faster and sexier than Fords. There are many words to describe this state of affairs, but "lottery" is not the one I would choose.
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Seattle Public Schools administrators are fighting a battle for schoolchildren across the state.The district has decided to go to the mat over teacher performance evaluations. District officials want teachers to be judged based in part on their students' academic growth.
The union says the proposal is a no-go. With the school year fast approaching, a strike could be in the offing.
The Seattle Education Association would rather stick to a previous compromise: an evaluation system that would put teachers who rate "basic" or "unsatisfactory" at risk of dismissal.
What a radical notion - that teacher performance should dictate a teacher's career prospects. Such is what qualifies as "historic change" - union officials' words - in public education.
The district's proposal is also rather modest contrary to the union's characterizations.
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Good eye contact, a firm handshake and self confidence can pave the way to a good interview. Turns out, that's the case even if the applicant is 4 or 5 years old.In the frenzy to get kindergarteners into the top private schools, parents are now hiring consultants to coach their children on the art of the interview.
For years, such preparations have been the norm for the standardized tests children must take to get into private schools, the so-called ERBs, which measure IQ and are administered by the Educational Records Bureau. But after a cottage industry devoted to test-prep materials and classes developed, parents say scoring in the top percentile or two became the norm rather than the exception; schools such as Horace Mann, Dalton and Collegiate began placing more emphasis on the interview and getting more granular in their assessments.
Since New York parents have a tendency to exaggerate their sons' and daughters' piano or French skills, admissions directors say they like to see any special talents with their own eyes.
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Two New York entrepreneurs are offering college students the chance to put their money where their grades are.Their website lets college students place wagers on their own academic performance, betting they will earn, say, an A in biology or a B in calculus. Students with low grade point averages are considered long shots, so they have the opportunity to win more money for high grades than classmates with a better GPA.
The pair of recent college graduates who founded Ultrinsic.com say they hope to turn a profit and inspire students to work harder. "It would be great if everyone was intrinsically motivated to get good grades, but that's, like, not reality," said Jeremy Gelbart, a 23-year-old co-founder of the site.
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CourseRank helps students choose classes, and 95% of Stanford students use it, says the company.UC Berkeley, Duke, Cornell and other universities and colleges in the U.S. and Canada now use it as well. The company now has five employees.
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New data show that fewer than 25% of 2010 graduates who took the ACT college-entrance exam possessed the academic skills necessary to pass entry-level courses, despite modest gains in college-readiness among U.S high-school students in the last few years.40 to 49% of Wisconsin High School Graduates who took the ACT met at least three of the four college readiness benchmarks. 50 to 54% of Minnesota's students met three out of four while 30-39% of Illinois students achieved that standard. Iowa's percentage was the same as Wisconsin's.The results raise questions about how well the nation's high schools are preparing students for college, and show the challenge facing the Obama administration in its effort to raise educational standards. The administration won bipartisan support for its education policies early on, but faces a tough fight in the fall over the rewrite and reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind program.
While elementary schools have shown progress on national achievement exams, high-school results have stayed perniciously low. Some experts say the lack of rigor in high-school courses is partly to blame.
"High schools are the downfall of American school reform," said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, a nonpartisan research organization in Washington. "We haven't figured out how to improve them on a broad scope and if our kids aren't dropping out physically, they are dropping out mentally."
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The Los Angeles Unified School District has done an admirable job of collecting useful data about its teachers -- which ones have the classroom magic that makes students learn and which ones annually let their students down. Yet it has never used that valuable information to analyze what successful teachers have in common, so that others can learn from them, or to let less effective teachers know how they're doing.Marketplace has more as does Daniel Willingham.For the record: This editorial says the federal Race to the Top grant program pushed states to make students' test scores count for half or more of a teacher's performance evaluation. Although the program has encouraged this by awarding its first grants to states that promised to do so, it has not formally required it.
If it weren't for the work of a team of Times reporters, this information might have remained uselessly locked away. Now that the paper is reporting on the wide disparities among teachers, the public is getting its first glimpse of some surprising findings.
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U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said Monday that parents have a right to know if their children's teachers are effective, endorsing the public release of information about how well individual teachers fare at raising their students' test scores."What's there to hide?" Duncan said in an interview one day after The Times published an analysis of teacher effectiveness in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation's second largest school system. "In education, we've been scared to talk about success."
Duncan's comments mark the first time the Obama administration has expressed support for a public airing of information about teacher performance -- a move that is sure to fan the already fierce debate over how to better evaluate teachers.Spurred by the administration, school districts around the country have moved to adopt "value added" measures, a statistical approach that relies on standardized test scores to measure student learning. Critics, including many teachers unions and some policy experts, say the method is based on flawed tests that don't measure the more intangible benefits of good teaching and lead to a narrow curriculum. In Los Angeles, the teachers union has called public disclosure of the results "dangerous" and "irresponsible."
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With less than a week before school starts, the California Department of Education released the results of the 2010 Standardized Testing and Reporting Program tests.As I looked at the numbers, I was encouraged as well as concerned.
There was growth in students scoring proficient or above in some grades and declines in others. Looking at the Sierra Sands Unified School District results, I was really tickled to see across-the-board growth at the high-school level. While gains were not overly dramatic, the results show movement in the right direction.
I was also pleased to see growth in the Trona Joint Unified School District elementary grades. This is a good sign, because the elementary school is in program improvement under the federal No Child Left Behind. I hope this growth is a sign of things to come.
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Come to Milwaukee and help grow the good food revolution. Hosted by Growing Power--a national organization headed by the sustainable urban farmer and MacArthur Fellow Will Allen--this international conference will teach the participant how to plan, develop and grow small farms in urban and rural areas. Learn how you can grow food year-round, no matter what the climate, and how you can build markets for small farms. See how you can play a part in creating a new food system that fosters better health and more closely-knit communities.
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There's already plenty of chatter about Sunday's LA Times article on the value-added scores of LAUSD teachers, and certainly more to come (comments blowing up here). With access to seven years of math and English scores for hundreds of thousands of 3rd through 5th grade students (under California Public Records Act), the Times hired RAND researcher Richard Buddin to conduct a value-added analysis on LAUSD teachers. Over the next few weeks, and likely beyond that, the Times promises to publish the findings of this analysis in articles and via a full database. For thousands of LAUSD teachers, this means they should expect to see their names and scores in their morning paper. For parents and the rest of the public, it means they will have more information about public school teachers' performance than ever before.
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The Board of Directors of Seattle Public Schools has four primary functions... and they fail to fulfill each of them.The Board, first and foremost, are the elected representatives of the public, but this Board doesn't represent the public at all. This Board doesn't raise the public's concerns, doesn't relay the public's wishes, and doesn't voice the public perspective. I almost never hear the Board members talk about the public or their constituents saying "People are concerned about.." or "People want..." or "People see it this way...".
The Board doesn't voice the public perspective and certainly doesn't advocate for it. Worse, the Board doesn't advocate for the public to have a voice for themselves. The Board is no champion of community engagement. The Board regularly approves motions with inadequate community engagement and regularly approves motions with NO community engagement. The Board hasn't demanded improved engagement from anyone and hasn't even demanded that the staff provide the community engagement that they promised to do. The Board's own community engagement is just about the worst of any workgroup in the District. Their primary community engagement practice is testimony at Board meetings and they never respond to the people who come and speak to them there.
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Todd Braver emerges from a tent nestled against the canyon wall. He has a slight tan, except for a slim pale band around his wrist.For the first time in three days in the wilderness, Mr. Braver is not wearing his watch. "I forgot," he says.
It is a small thing, the kind of change many vacationers notice in themselves as they unwind and lose track of time. But for Mr. Braver and his companions, these moments lead to a question: What is happening to our brains?
Mr. Braver, a psychology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, was one of five neuroscientists on an unusual journey. They spent a week in late May in this remote area of southern Utah, rafting the San Juan River, camping on the soft banks and hiking the tributary canyons.
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A controversial overhaul of classroom teaching in Scotland will take effect as secondary pupils begin returning to school after the summer break.The Curriculum for Excellence, which has been four years in the making, aims to give teachers more freedom and make lessons less prescriptive.
Some teachers, unions and opposition parties have expressed concern the curriculum is not ready.
But Scottish ministers have given assurances it will improve standards.
And Education Secretary Mike Russell said the current system was not being largely re-written.
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I have never let my schooling interfere with my education - Mark Twain.Our new, wired world has brought forth many positives. One of the simplest, yet powerful, of the new tools available is the ability to bookmark worthy Internet materials for future use.
Even more powerful is the ability to share those materials indirectly through the use of sites like Delicious. We subscribe so as to have the most popular education bookmarks forwarded to us on a daily basis.
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Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:
I'm not so sure we have all that much to brag about in terms of our statewide educational standards or achievement. The Milwaukee public schools are extremely challenged, to put it mildly. The state has one of the worst achievement gaps in the nation. The WKCE is widely acknowledged as a poor system for statewide assessment of student progress. Just last week our state academic standards were labeled among the worst in the country in a national study.There is generally no small amount of bragging on Madison National Merit Semi-finalists. It would be interesting to compare cut scores around the country.We brag about how well Wisconsin students do on the ACT, and this is certainly good. But about 30 states have higher cut scores than Wisconsin when it comes to identifying National Merit Scholars, which means that their top 1% of students taking the test score higher than our top 1% do. (We in the MMSD are justly proud of our inordinate number of National Merit semi-finalists, but if - heaven forbid - MMSD were to be plopped down in the middle of Illinois, our number of semi-finalists would go down, perhaps significantly so. Illinois students need a higher score on the PSAT to be designated a National Merit semi-finalist than Wisconsin students do.)
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But Daly returned home from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and headed straight to the local community college for more classes.Community colleges in the Washington region are doing brisk business this summer with students from four-year universities. The students are taking advantage of increasingly flexible transfer policies to load up on cheap, convenient credits that will help them graduate more quickly and at a lower expense.
Prince George's Community College enrolled 136 students from four-year colleges this summer, nearly double last year's number. Tidewater Community College in Virginia has 2,150 four-year college students, up 14 percent. Montgomery College has 3,100 four-year college students, about one-quarter of its summer enrollment. No comparison with last year's enrollment was available.
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How Global Universities Are Reshaping the WorldBy Ben Wildavsky. Princeton Univ. 240 pp. $26.95
Globalization is changing the food we eat, the way we communicate and, increasingly, the way we go to college. Nearly 3 million students were enrolled in universities outside their borders in 2009, a 57 percent increase over the previous decade, according to the Institute of International Education, which facilitates exchange programs.
"The Great Brain Race," by Ben Wildavsky, takes a comprehensive look at today's worldwide marketplace for college students -- with stops in such places as Singapore, South Korea and Saudi Arabia, where western schools, including the University of Chicago and potentially George Mason University, are opening satellite campuses or where local governments are making heavy investments in American-style research universities. The author, a former education editor at U.S. News & World Report, also explores the latest attempts to rate the world's top colleges now that more students are degree-shopping across borders.
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Jordan Holt needed a business plan. So he went back to school.A technician for a military contractor in Yuma, Ariz., Mr. Holt launched a side business last year, servicing and repairing generators--and quickly realized he would need to write up a formal plan if he ever wanted to borrow money for equipment. But after doing some online research, putting together a plan "looked complicated and overwhelming," he says.
He decided to get the help he needed from a business-plan development course at Arizona Western College in Yuma. "I was able to take everything in my head and put it down on paper," says Mr. Holt, a 29-year-old ex-Marine. "I truly think it could work."
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Madison and nearby school districts annually publicize their National Merit Scholar counts.
Consequently, I read with interest Madison School Board member Ed Hughes' recent blog post:
We brag about how well Wisconsin students do on the ACT, and this is certainly good. But about 30 states have higher cut scores than Wisconsin when it comes to identifying National Merit Scholars, which means that their top 1% of students taking the test score higher than our top 1% do. (We in the MMSD are justly proud of our inordinate number of National Merit semi-finalists, but if - heaven forbid - MMSD were to be plopped down in the middle of Illinois, our number of semi-finalists would go down, perhaps significantly so. Illinois students need a higher score on the PSAT to be designated a National Merit semi-finalist than Wisconsin students do.)I asked a few people who know about such things and received this response:
The critical cut score for identifying National Merit Semifinalist varies from state to state depending on the number of students who took the test and how well those students did on the test. In 2009, a score of 207 would put a student amongst the top 1% of test takers in Wisconsin and qualify them as a National Merit Semifinalist. However this score would not be high enough to qualify the student as a semifinalist in 36 other states or the District of Columbia.View individual state cut scores, by year here. In 2010, Minnesota's cut score was 215, Illinois' 214, Iowa 209 and Michigan 209. Wisconsin's was 207.
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During the last weeks of the term, third graders at School 58-World of Inquiry School created an oil spill in a bowl. Under the guidance of teacher Alyson Ricci, they tried to clean it up. Cotton swabs worked.The school last year won the national Excellence in Urban Education Award, with all students meeting state proficiency rates in science and social studies. It's an exception, though, in a Rochester system where fewer than half of the 32,000 public-school students graduate on time.
Rochester Mayor Robert Duffy wants to set up more schools that produce results like World of Inquiry's. But he says the superintendent's efforts to close failing schools and open new ones have been hobbled by a school board mired in minutia. He is pushing to dissolve the elected board in favor of one appointed by the mayor and city council for a five-year test period. New York's state legislature is considering the bid.
As cities come under increasing pressure to fix failing schools, more are, like Rochester, trying to take matters into their own hands--or at least those of their mayors.
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The September opening of New Jersey's first Hebrew-language charter school is being challenged over claims it hasn't met enrollment requirements.The East Brunswick school board this week asked an appeals court to temporarily block Hatikvah International Academy Charter School's final charter, saying the school's enrollment doesn't meet charter-school regulations and that Hatikvah's failure to provide enrollment information makes it difficult for the district to plan for the school year. The motion follows an earlier complaint by the school board to the state's education commissioner, Bret Schundler.
State officials declined to comment on the pending case. "The charter school met requirements when its application was approved," said a Department of Education spokesman, Alan Guenther. Hatikvah received its final charter from the education commissioner on July 6. New Jersey code requires charter schools to verify 90% of enrollment by June 30; in the case of Hatikvah, that would have been 97 of its 108-student capacity.
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One of the most useful traits an editor can possess is an openness to surprises, and no book I've ever worked on has surprised me more than The Chicago Manual of Style. Little did I suspect back in 1992, when I first read the Manual paragraph by paragraph for a basic manuscript editing class, that I would eventually join the team responsible for keeping this classic, century-old publication current. Nor would I have guessed in 1998, when I helped create the first manuscript for the 15th edition by slicing apart a bound copy of the 14th, that nine years later we would initiate the 16th edition by extracting the XML files used for the full-text HTML version of the 15th. And yes, a late adopter of technology like me may never have learned to fling around such terminology of the digital age if not for my work on the 16th edition, which will be published this summer. Go figure.Still, the biggest surprises I've encountered in connection with the Manual have come in the responses of those who use the book, or at least understand its place in the canon. More often than not, people who hear that I work on the Manual--even those from outside the worlds of academia and publishing--instantly recognize the title, a rare treat for an editor in scholarly publishing. Sometimes they tell me stories of college days spent wrestling with proper footnote format or of interoffice battles over comma use, both of which likely involved recourse to the Manual. Inevitably, they ask me questions. Their curiosity increasingly centers on the broad issues that preoccupy those of us on the revision team, such as how changes wrought by technology affect everything from editing processes to citation style. But the question I still field most frequently concerns a matter of much smaller scale:
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In 1983, a presidential commission issued the landmark report "A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform." The report warned that despite an increase in spending, the U.S. public education system was at risk of failure "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today," the report declared, "we might well have viewed it as an act of war."New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein often quotes the commission before discussing how U.S. schools have fared since it issued its report. Despite nearly doubling per capita spending on education over the past few decades, American 15-year olds fared dismally in standardized math tests given in 2000, placing 18th out of 27 member countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Six years later, the U.S. had slipped to 25th out of 30. If Americans have been fighting against mediocrity in education since 1983, they are losing the battle.
What could turn things around? At a recent event that I organized at the Columbia Business School, Klein opened with his harsh assessment of the situation, and researchers offered some stark options for getting American education back on track. We could find drastically better ways of training teachers or improve our hiring practices so we're bringing aboard better teachers in the first place. Barring these improvements, the only option left is firing low-performing teachers--who have traditionally had lifetime tenure--en masse.
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Fion Chan Chui-tung could barely utter a complete sentence in Putonghua or English a year ago.Now, after 12 months at Utahloy International School, a sprawling and pristine international school in Guangzhou, the Hong Kong teen converses effortlessly with her ethnically diverse schoolmates.
Fion, 18, is one of a growing number of pupils who have upped sticks and headed north to study. Enrollment of Hongkongers in international schools in Guangzhou and Shenzhen is rising by 5 to 10 per cent a year.
Parents who spurn prestigious international schools in Hong Kong in favour of mainland ones cite a list of factors: lower tuition fees, low living costs, a strict teaching regimen and bucolic campuses where not a word of Cantonese is spoken.
Fion's mother, Luk Yim-fong, a businesswoman, transferred her daughter from Heung To Secondary School in Tseung Kwan O to Utahloy so that she would not be surrounded by Cantonese speakers. "Although Heung To offers Putonghua classes, all the students speak Cantonese after class," she says. "From my business dealings with multinational corporations like Samsung, even Korean businessmen speak fluent Putonghua. Mandarin is a language my daughter must master in order to thrive in future."
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Every fall, I explain to a fresh batch of Ph.D. students what a Ph.D. is.Well worth reading.It's hard to describe it in words.
So, I use pictures.
Read below for the illustrated guide to a Ph.D.
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The state Senate Education Committee will meet on Monday to discuss a measure that would revamp New Jersey's charter school regulation system.State Education Commissioner Bret D. Schundler, who supports the expansion of charter schools, is scheduled to attend the hearing to outline the Christie administration's priorities regarding education in New Jersey.
The meeting will also focus on bill S-2198, a measure sponsored by Senate Education Committee Chairwoman Teresa Ruiz (D-Essex) and Senator Sandra Bolden Cunningham (D-Hudson), which would enable Rutgers University to authorize charter schools. The bill is designed to expedite the approval of charter school applications, and permit the authorization of special purpose charter schools.
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Jason Felch, Jason Song and Doug Smith
The fifth-graders at Broadous Elementary School come from the same world -- the poorest corner of the San Fernando Valley, a Pacoima neighborhood framed by two freeways where some have lost friends to the stray bullets of rival gangs.Much more on "Value Added Assessment" and teacher evaluations here. Locally, Madison's Value Added Assessment evaluations are based on the oft criticized WKCE.Many are the sons and daughters of Latino immigrants who never finished high school, hard-working parents who keep a respectful distance and trust educators to do what's best.
The students study the same lessons. They are often on the same chapter of the same book.
Yet year after year, one fifth-grade class learns far more than the other down the hall. The difference has almost nothing to do with the size of the class, the students or their parents.
It's their teachers.
With Miguel Aguilar, students consistently have made striking gains on state standardized tests, many of them vaulting from the bottom third of students in Los Angeles schools to well above average, according to a Times analysis. John Smith's pupils next door have started out slightly ahead of Aguilar's but by the end of the year have been far behind.
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Education in South Korea is a paradox, where two big truths clash. Koreans are incredibly keen, and on many measures do very well. Yet nobody - students, parents, teachers or the authorities - is happy. And now battles are raging, on everything from testing and elitism to teachers' politics, free school meals and corporal punishment.Let's start with the positive. I'm a bit skeptical when Koreans tell you how their Confucian heritage values learning. In theory yes, yet for centuries hardly anyone got to study except a tiny male scholar elite. Modern education - girls not excluded - only arrived with Christian missionaries in the late 19th century. Mass schooling for all is newer still. As recently as 1945, when Japan's harsh 40-year rule ended, less than a quarter of Korean adults (22%) were literate.
They've certainly made up for lost time since. South Korea's first rulers were no democrats, but they knew that so resource-poor a country needed human capital to develop. Hence even after a terrible war in 1950-53 and despite being poorer than much of Africa - yes, really - at that stage, under Syngman Rhee (1948-1960) primary education was vastly expanded. General Park Chung-hee (1961-1979) extended this to secondary and vocational schooling. By 1987, when South Koreans wrested back democracy from another general (Chun Doo-hwan), one third of high school-leavers went on to higher education: more than in the UK at that time.
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CHILDREN can be tender souls. Pitch them a sob story and they often swallow it whole. Reflect the harsh reality outside the school gates, however, and they develop sophisticated strategies for making hard choices. That, at least, is the early experience of an initiative to teach philanthropy to young teenagers.Two years ago the Big Give, an organisation which collates information about 6,000 charities worldwide in an attempt to foster philanthropy, asked the fee-paying Dragon School in Oxford to run a pilot programme. It gave the school £1,250 to donate to charity and asked 13-year-old pupils to decide where the money should go.
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The study of Shakespeare never grows old. His plays are counted among the greatest works in English literature. He was an outstanding observer and communicator of human character. He expressed enduring wisdom and wit. Presented appropriately, students--especially gifted students--are fascinated by Shakespeare and appreciate the opportunity to study and perform his plays. There are a number of excellent resources available to help teachers and parents expose their children to this icon of literature.
The Folger Shakespeare Library is located on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. It is home to the world's largest collection of Shakespeare materials. On its Web site, there is a Teach and Learn section that contains a wealth of information. Teaching resources for K-12 provide Shakespeare lesson plans and other materials for teachers, including audio and video podcasts, a blog, a Teachers' Lounge forum, and an expanding list of web features. The Shakespeare for Kids section of the site offers games, activities, and creative fun. Folger is a strong advocate of performance-based teaching, which is reflected in the resources at their Web site.
The University of Texas at Austin created Shakespeare Kids. It is designed for young people and also for teachers, parents, and administrators who work with students in grades K-8. The resource page contains an excellent list of Internet sites, books, and films.
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Children crowd into a large, open room an hour drive from Peshawar, Pakistan, their young bodies packed together despite the lingering heat. A small boy with a serious face sits in the back, a copy of the Quran on the cement floor beside him.Madrasas like this have come to dominate much of rural education in countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the state has forgotten its children and the mullahs have room to step in.
But with the Taliban insurgency going strong and a rising Islamic militancy in Pakistan, experts worry that such schools -- which often push a more fundamentalist brand of Islam than is traditional in these countries -- have become fertile recruiting grounds for the Taliban.
With their own public education systems in shambles, however, Afghanistan and Pakistan are beginning to look to Turkey's brand of Islamic education as a potential antidote to madrasas where there is often little offered beyond rote memorization of the Quran.
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Noting that far more students attend charter schools in Philadelphia than are enrolled in the state's second-largest school district, a group has formed to represent city charters.Founders of Philadelphia Charters for Excellence say they want to publicize the successes of charter schools and reassure the public that most of the 74 charters are not being investigated for possible corruption.
The organization requires member schools to meet strict ethical standards and plans to create a website to help parents compare the performance of charter schools.
The nonprofit organization was scheduled to be announced Friday.
"There are 74 of us, and in a typical school district with 74 schools, there would be a public-relations representative," said Jurate Krokys, chief executive officer of Independence Charter School in Center City and the group's vice president. "The idea is to be a resource about charter schools in Philadelphia."
The group's mission statement calls it "an alliance of high-performing public charter schools committed to creating a path toward academic and personal excellence for all students."
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Channel3000, via a kind reader:
Minutes before the Badger Rock Middle School planning team presented its final proposal to the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education Thursday, supporters received news that they had been awarded a planning grant from the Department of Public Instruction in the amount of $200,000.The proposed Badger Rock Middle School, which would open in the fall of 2011 on Madison's south side, would be a year-round charter school and be part of a larger Resilience Research Center project spearheaded by the Madison-based Center for Resilient Cities.
The Resilience Research Center project is designed to be a four-acre campus with a working farm, a neighborhood center, café, adjacent city park and the proposed school.
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Three weeks had passed since Shannon Rosa had glanced over the numbers on her tiny blue raffle ticket. Like many other parents, she had agreed to cough up $5 not because she thought she had any real chance of winning, but to support the school.Now, as she sat in her Honda Odyssey in a Redwood City parking lot, about to pick up some tacos for the family, her cellphone rang. It was the school secretary. Rosa had won the raffle.
Alone in her van, she screamed. Then she drove straight to Clifford School to claim her prize: a glistening new iPad.
Although Rosa already owned an iPod Touch, she had purposely held off on the iPad. She isn't an early adopter; she likes to wait until the kinks are worked out. But for $5, she didn't mind taking the iPad home one bit. Maybe Leo would like it.
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In June 2010, the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) offered the nation two sets of English language arts standards: one set called "college and career readiness anchor standards," and the other, grade-level standards that build towards these anchor standards. With few exceptions, both sets of standards consist of content-empty and culture-free generic skills. Why are they so bereft of substantive content? In large part because they reflect a faulty diagnosis of why many American students are unprepared for authentic college-level work. The misdiagnosis comes from CCSSI's reliance on the results of ACT surveys to guide the development of its standards.Several years ago, ACT surveyed thousands of post-secondary instructors to find out what they saw as the chief problems in their freshman students. Not surprisingly, the chief complaint was that high school graduates cannot understand the college texts they are assigned to read. Without an explanation for its reasoning, ACT leaped to two conclusions: (1) college students are not expected to read enough complex texts when they are in high school; and (2) they are not given enough instruction in strategies or skills for reading complex texts in high school.
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Patricia Bailey and Robert Femiano
The Seattle Public Schools administration is proposing to tie teacher evaluations and employment to student test scores -- a bone of contention in current negotiations with the Seattle Education Association. Guest columnists Pat Bailey and Robert Femiano, past union board members, argue that the district's approach is wrong.Clusty search: Robert Femiano and Patricia Bailey.The Seattle school district is proposing to tie teacher evaluations and employment to student test scores.
The current teacher evaluation includes student growth as a factor but the district wants an easier path and quicker time frames for teacher dismissals. The district officials' plan is to use test scores to fire those teachers they claim are responsible for the poverty and racial academic gaps and reward those with high improvements in scores. History shows this carrot-and-stick approach not only fails to reduce the achievement gap but is ultimately unhealthy for good teaching.
One result of high-stakes testing is clear: The inordinate focus on test scores narrows what is taught. Diane Ravitch's "The death and life of the great American school system" documents this and other unintended consequences. In order to keep their jobs, teachers will teach and re-teach to the test. Lost are the arts, music, PE, civics, science and even recess. Early-childhood experts point to rich school environments as crucial to healthy development, so who wants to cause the opposite?
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Here's Sandra Alberti, Director of Math and Science Education at the NJ DOE. in NJ Spotlight:We have this thing called Algebra I that exists in very different forms, even within the same school.That's her admirably candid response to the results of pilot tests of Algebra I and Biology, which demonstrates the gap in proficiency between poor and wealthy students. "On the biology test, just a quarter of the students in the poorest districts were proficient, compared with more than 80 percent in the wealthiest." For Algebra I, "75 percent of students in the poorest districts were deemed "below basic," while that number was 11 percent in the richest districts."In other words, 75% of NJ's poor students failed both the biology test and the algebra test while only 20% of NJ's wealthy students failed biology and 11% failed algebra. Odds are high, based on Alberti's comment, that the vast majority of the poor students passed their coursework in spite of lack of proficiency.
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Hunching over her notebook at Borough of Manhattan Community College, Sharasha Croslen struggled to figure out what to do with the algebra problem in front of her: x2 + 2x - 8 = 0.It was a question every ninth grader is expected to be able to answer. (For those who have erased the ninth grade from memory, the answer is at the end of the article.) But even though Ms. Croslen managed to complete three years of math and graduate from high school, she did not know how to solve for x.
"It's incredibly frustrating," she said during a break from her remedial math course, where she has spent the last several weeks reviewing arithmetic and algebra. "I know this is stuff I should know, but either I didn't learn it or I forgot it all already."
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So do school districts that spend more money per pupil perform better? I checked out the financial figures for the 2007-08* school year in Texas and found that more money per pupil doesn't necessarily make a school better. Of the top 10 school districts and charter schools that spent more money in operating expenses per student, one held the state's highest rating, "exemplary;" three were "recognized;" and the remaining six were "academically acceptable." (Go to the jump for a list of these schools).Related: The report mentions that California's average per student expenditure is just under $10,000 annually. Madison's 2009/2010 per student spending was $15,241 ($370,287,471 budget / 24,295 students).Carroll ISD, an exemplary school district, spent $8,301 per student, compared to $9,446 per student in the academically-acceptable Dallas ISD.
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In 2010, with the blessing and encouragement of the nation's president and secretary of education, we are establishing "common-core standards" to address the historical claim that our public schools are failures. In the 1890s, a similar lament was voiced by the group known as the Committee of Ten:"When college professors endeavor to teach chemistry, physics, botany, zoology, meteorology, or geology to persons of 18 or 20 years of age, they discover that in most instances new habits of observing, reflecting, and recording have to be painfully acquired by the students--habits which they should have acquired in early childhood."
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The College Board is about to announce a change in the Advanced Placement program that will end the penalty for wrong answers.So after decades in which test takers were warned against random guessing, they may now do so without fear of hurting their scores. The shift is notable because the SAT continues to penalize wrong answers, such that those who cannot eliminate any of the answers are discouraged from guessing. The ACT, which has gained market share against the SAT in recent years, does not have such a penalty. At this point, the College Board is changing its policy only for the AP exams.
Under College Board policy to date, AP scores have been based on the total number of correct answers minus a fraction for every incorrect answer -- one-fourth of a point for questions with five possible answers and one-third of a point for questions with four possible answers. The idea is that no one should engage in "random guessing." The odds shift, of course, if a test taker can eliminate one or more possible answers, and the College Board's advice to test takers acknowledges this, saying that "if you have SOME knowledge of the question, and can eliminate one or more answer choices, informed guessing from among the remaining choices is usually to your advantage."
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A new report by the Michigan League for Human Services bemoans the lack of tax money going to higher education. But the authors give a skewed view of appropriations, get some facts wrong, and completely miss the 800-pound gorilla of higher education: that increasing costs drive tuition increases.The bottom line in Michigan is that state appropriations for higher education have been essentially unchanged since fiscal 2004, though there was a decrease prior to that. When MLHS authors complain of falling appropriations, they're crying over milk spilled six years ago.
The authors also fault the state for the loss of financial aid programs, but the level of assistance offered by state universities has never been higher. While some state government programs were put on the chopping block, it's a pretty standard practice among universities to subsidize desirable candidates, and these amounts grew substantially. The level of financial aid offered by universities increased from $288 million in 2005 to $456 million in 2009, according to a report from the House Fiscal Agency. Perhaps that is one reason why gifted and motivated students tend to get scholarships.
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One in 12 babies born in the U.S. in 2008 were offspring of illegal immigrants, according to a new study, an estimate that could inflame the debate over birthright citizenship.Undocumented immigrants make up slightly more than 4% of the U.S. adult population. However, their babies represented twice that share, or 8%, of all births on U.S. soil in 2008, according to the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center's report.
"Unauthorized immigrants are younger than the rest of the population, are more likely to be married and have higher fertility rates than the rest of the population," said Jeffrey Passel, a senior demographer at Pew in Washington, D.C.
The report, based on Pew's analysis of the Census Bureau's March 2009 Current Population Survey, also found that the lion's share, or 79%, of the 5.1 million children of illegal immigrants residing in the U.S. in 2009 were born in the country and are therefore citizens.
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"The Fight Over Education in Washington" (editorial, July 31) says "teachers unions and other forces of the status quo" are trying to discredit the Obama education initiative, Race to the Top.There is nothing "retrograde" about objecting to the pernicious effect standardized assessment has had on our children, schools and a generation of teachers. And there is nothing "reform"-minded about a policy -- begun under President George W. Bush and adapted by the current administration -- that reinforces those negative consequences.
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Hillsborough School Board members rated superintendent MaryEllen Elia's overall performance this past school year as "above satisfactory.''In their annual review of the district leader, board members gave Elia high marks for her leadership, policy-making, organization, management, values and ethics.
Her total score was 282, just two points shy of outstanding and the same score as the previous school year.
Board members applauded Elia's efforts in landing a $100 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Board members also said Elia was "much more open minded to suggestions ... '' while adding, "she needs to listen more.''
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The future of education technology is one where schools continually outsource the activities they're not as good at to focus on their specialty, educating the leaders of tomorrow. At its core, this is simply the law of comparative advantage: the ability of a party (individual or firm) to produce a particular good or service at a lower opportunity cost than another party (per Wikipedia). Basically, if someone does something better than you can, you should allow them to do it for you so you can focus on your specialty. This results in "gains from trade".The future of education technology will benefit from such gains. The internet enables schools to gain efficiencies by outsourcing what they can't do as well to dedicated technologists, allowing more innovative education technology to flow into schools at a lower cost.
We're already seeing this take place. While developing the LearnBoost Gradebook, we spoke to numerous schools (public and charter) about their technology needs. These were the most common situations we found:
Schools are loyal to their current technology provider despite expensive and inadequate software solutions. Legacy systems and entrenched interests generate steep switching costs and make it difficult to reach a consensus among stakeholders.
Schools are spending too much money outsourcing their data management to a Student Information System (SIS) provider.
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As legislators and lobbyists congratulate themselves on the 2300 pages of legalese drafted to reform Wall Street banks and the financial services industry, not one paragraph addresses a major reason why the meltdown occurred: how American consumers learn to manage money. According to several mortgage banking studies, nearly 70 percent of the victims of foreclosure admit they did not understand the terms of the deal they signed or the long-term impact on their lives.Congress had plenty of chances to address this problem. More than 30 bills focused on financial literacy have been introduced since 2006. All of them died in Senate or House committees. None were included in this recent reform bill.
Money, like sex, is supposed to be taught at home but in a 2008 Charles Schwab study, 69% of parents interviewed reported they were more prepared to discuss sex than money with their children.
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Last week I noted that Fordham had offered up the Gadfly as a platform for an argument, made by guest columnist Eugenia Kemble, that the next logical step after establishing national standards is a single national curriculum.Well, my post has drawn a sharp response from Kemble. Of course, she disagrees with me on the substance (the merits of a national curriculum and the badness of teachers' unions) but that goes without saying. More interestingly, she accuses me of not addressing her argument on the merits, but only being concerned with the significance of her piece having appeared in the Gadfly. The indictment has two counts. First, she accuses me of not offering an argument for my position that "common" standards adopted by the states are really "federal" standards (i.e. controlled by the federal government.) Second, she accuses me of practicing "guilt by association" by insinuating that if Checker publishes a union piece, he must embrace the entire union agenda.
To the second count I plead not guilty. I didn't insinuate that Checker agrees with the unions about everything. I insinuated that his position in favor of national standards was having the effect - whether intended or not - of advancing the unions' agenda in one respect. And that the appearance of Kemble's piece in the Gadfly clearly demonstrates that those of us who have been saying this all along were right. And I stand by that insinuation.
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In 1961, the average full-time student at a four-year college in the United States studied about twenty-four hours per week, while his modern counterpart puts in only fourteen hours per week. Students now study less than half as much as universities claim to require. This dramatic decline in study time occurred for students from all demographic subgroups, for students who worked and those who did not, within every major, and at four-year colleges of every type, degree structure, and level of selectivity. Most of the decline predates the innovations in technology that are most relevant to education and thus was not driven by such changes. The most plausible explanation for these findings, we conclude, is that standards have fallen at postsecondary institutions in the United States.Key points in this Outlook:
- Study time for full-time students at four-year colleges in the United States fell from twenty-four hours per week in 1961 to fourteen hours per week in 2003, and the decline is not explained by changes over time in student work status, parental education, major choice, or the type of institution students attended.
- Evidence that declines in study time result from improvements in education technology is slim. A more plausible explanation is that achievement standards have fallen.
- Longitudinal data indicate that students who study more in college earn more in the long run.
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Twenty of our public schools in the Fairbanks area made "Adequate Yearly Progress" in the past year, while 15 did not.But as in previous years, it is impossible to say exactly what this means about the quality of education in any of those schools. The state education department released the details last week.
Statewide, 203 schools failed to make adequate progress, while 302 made the mark.
As a means of judging educational achievement, the process used to determined AYP in Alaska has always been inadequate. For some of our schools, there is real significance in either a positive or a negative rating. For others, there is not.
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Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:
Susan Troller had a typically good and very substantive article in the Capital Times this week about merit pay for teachers and other dimensions of teacher evaluations.Merit pay is an issue that highlights the culture clash between the new breed of educational reformers and the traditional education establishment that finds its foundation in teachers and their unions.
Educational reformers nowadays frequently come to education as an avocation after successful business careers. These reformers, like Bill Gates and Eli Broad, believe that our approach to education can be improved if we import the sort of approaches to quality and innovation that have proved effective in the business world.
So, for example, let's figure out what's the single most important school-based variable in determining student achievement. Research indicates that it's the quality of the teacher. Well then, let's evaluate teachers in a way that lets us assess that quality, let's put in place professional development that will allow our teachers to enhance that quality, and let's have compensation systems that allow us to reward that quality.
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Unlike many who take courses during UW-Madison's summer session, Peter Owen hasn't spent any hot evenings catching up on his studies while sipping a cold beer on the Memorial Union Terrace.
Owen is a 24-year-old first lieutenant stationed in Iraq with the 724th Engineer Battalion of the Wisconsin Army National Guard. So instead of sitting near the shore of Lake Mendota while finishing coursework, he's knocked off some required readings and listened to recorded lectures on an MP3 player while seated in the back of a military transport aircraft waiting to take off on another mission.
"I have really enjoyed the opportunity to keep working toward my degree while deployed," Owen, who is taking a foreign policy history course from UW-Madison professor Jeremi Suri, says in an e-mail interview. Owen was a graduate student at Valparaiso University pursuing a masters in International Commerce and Policy prior to being deployed.
Welcome to the modern world of "distance education," a field that incorporates various styles of teaching and a range of technologies to deliver education to students who aren't sitting in a traditional classroom. While evolving technology continues to drastically change how people communicate, get their news and make purchases, it's generally having a less dramatic impact on how higher education is delivered -- at least at a place like UW-Madison, where just 2.5 percent of all credit hours are taken through distance education courses.
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The Apollo 20 Math Fellows Program is a one-year Urban Education Fellowship Program located in Houston, Texas.The Houston Independent School District (HISD) is looking for dynamic college graduates to commit one year to improving the academic achievement of inner-city students. You will tutor five pairs of middle- or high-school students in math, every day, for the whole school year. You will have the opportunity to build close relationships with each of your students, and the chance to make a significant impact on their lives. This program is unique in that it is the first large-scale tutoring program integrated into the students' school day that has ever been launched in an urban public school district. With your help, Houston can become a leading innovator in the urban education field.
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Bill Gates thinks something is going to die too.Andrew Coulson wonders why Gatest distinguished between College and K-12? That's a good question. There are many, many online resources that provide an excellent learning experience.No, it's not physical books like Nicholas Negroponte -- instead, Gates thinks the idea of young adults having to go to universities in order to get an education is going to go away relatively soon. Well, provided they're self-motivated learners.
"Five years from now on the web for free you'll be able to find the best lectures in the world," Gates said at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, CA today. "It will be better than any single university," he continued.
He believes that no matter how you came about your knowledge, you should get credit for it. Whether it's an MIT degree or if you got everything you know from lectures on the web, there needs to be a way to highlight that.
He made sure to say that educational institutions are still vital for children, K-12. He spoke glowingly about charter schools, where kids can spend up to 80% of their time deeply engaged with learning.
But college needs to be less "place-based," according to Gates. Well, except for the parties, he joked.
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As the Iowa governor's race takes shape, some of the sharpest differences have been about the state's education system, which accounts for roughly 60 percent of Iowa's $5.3 billion budget.Both Democratic Gov. Chet Culver and Republican Terry Branstad said education will be a priority, but they have made it clear that they favor different approaches for the state's elementary and secondary schools. In fact, a key difference relates to children who haven't even started kindergarten.
Culver speaks repeatedly about his success in making state-paid preschool available to nearly every 4-year-old in the state.
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Based on the numbers, Carstens Elementary School on Detroit's East Side should have closed by now. The building is 95 years old, and its enrollment last year fell to 234 from 719 a decade earlier, making it one of the fastest-shrinking schools in district history.In the spring, Carstens was on a preliminary list of 45 schools targeted for closure by Robert C. Bobb, the state-appointed executive in charge of stabilizing the finances of Detroit Public Schools, and his team of accountants, planners and demographers.
But a deeper dive into the neighborhood changed their minds. Carstens, they discovered, was one of the few public institutions within miles. It also served as a health clinic, a seven-day-a-week recreation center and a food pantry. Closing Carstens, they concluded, would effectively turn off the lights on the whole neighborhood.
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The Irving school district missed achieving a "recognized" rating in the recently released state accountability ratings because the completion rates for black students fell 1 percentage point short of the standard.The ratings showed an 84 percent completion rate for black students, short of the required 85 percent. Completion rates represent students who graduated or continued high school rather than dropping out. The district kept the "academically acceptable" rating it has maintained since 2004.
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Earlier this year Massachusetts enacted a law that allowed districts to remove at least half the teachers and the principal at their lowest-performing schools. The school turnaround legislation aligned the state with the Obama administration's Race to the Top program incentives and a chance to collect a piece of the $3.4 billion in federal grant money.From Washington this makes abundant good sense, a way to galvanize rapid and substantial change in schools for children who need it most.
In practice, on the ground, it is messy for the people most necessary for turning a school around -- the teachers -- and not always fair.
Often the decisions about which teachers will stay and which will go are made by new principals who may be very good, but don't know the old staff. "We had several good teachers asked to leave," said Heather Gorman, a fourth-grade teacher who will be staying at Blackstone Elementary here, where 38 of 50 teachers were removed. "Including my sister who's been a special-ed teacher 22 years."
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In a 1963 Supreme Court opinion, Chief Justice Earl Warren observed that "the fantastic advances in the field of electronic communication constitute a great danger to the privacy of the individual." The advances have only accelerated since then, along with the dangers. Today, as companies strive to personalize the services and advertisements they provide over the Internet, the surreptitious collection of personal information is rampant. The very idea of privacy is under threat.Most of us view personalization and privacy as desirable things, and we understand that enjoying more of one means giving up some of the other. To have goods, services and promotions tailored to our personal circumstances and desires, we need to divulge information about ourselves to corporations, governments or other outsiders.
This tradeoff has always been part of our lives as consumers and citizens. But now, thanks to the Net, we're losing our ability to understand and control those tradeoffs--to choose, consciously and with awareness of the consequences, what information about ourselves we disclose and what we don't. Incredibly detailed data about our lives are being harvested from online databases without our awareness, much less our approval.
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Badger Rock Middle School Planning Committee 1.8mb PDF:
Superintendent Nerad, President Cole and Members of the Board,Please accept this detailed proposal for Badger Rock Middle School, a project based charter school proposed for South Madison, which focuses on cultural and environmental sustainability. As you know, our charter school concept is part of the larger Resilience Research Center project spearheaded by the Madison based Center for Resilient Cities (CRC), bringing urban agriculture, community wellness,sustainability and alternative energy education to South Madison and the MMSD community.
We are proud of the work we have been able to accomplish to date and the extraordinary encouragement and support we have gotten from the neighborhood, business and non-profit community, local and national funders, and MMSD staff and Board. We are confident that Badger Rock Middle School, with its small class size, collaborative approach, stewardship and civic engagement model, will increase student achievement, strengthen relationships and learning outcomes for all students who attend, while also offering unparalleled opportunities for all MMSD students and faculty to make use of the resources, curriculum and facility.
Our stellar team of educators, community supporters, funders and business leaders continues to expand. Our curriculum team has created models for best practices with new templates for core curriculum areas. Our building and design team has been working collaboratively with architects Hoffman LLC, the Center for Resilient Cities and MMSD staff on building and site plans. In addition, outreach teams have been working with neighborhood leaders and community members, and our governance team has been actively recruiting a terrific team for the governing board and our fundraising team has been working hard to bring local and national donors to the project. In short, we've got great momentum and have only begun to scratch the surface of what this school and project could become.
We are submitting the proposal with a budget neutral scenario for MMSD and also want to assure you that we are raising funds to cover any contingencies that might arise so that additional monies from MMSD will not be needed. Our planning grant from DP! has recently been approved, seeding the school $175,000 in planning grant monies immediately, with another $175, 000 to arrive before the school opens in August 2011.
We ask for your full support of this proposal and the creation of Badger Rock Middle School. BRMS will surely be a centerpiece and shining star of MMSD for years to come.
Thanks for your consideration.Sincerely,
Badger Rock Middle School Planning Committee
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Madison School District 4.8MB PDF:
The Board of Education adopted Equity Policy 9001 on June 2, 2008 (http://boeweb.madison.k12.wi.us/policies/9001). The policy incorporates recommendations from the Equity Task Force and charges MMSD administration with developing an annual report of the extent to which progress is being made towards eliminating gaps in access, opportunities and achievement for all students. The Equity Task Force recommendations also requested annual data on the distribution of resources (budget, staff, programs, and facilities) by school.On September 29, 2009, the Board of Education adopted a new strategic plan which established strategic priorities and objectives for the Madison Metropolitan School District. The Equity Task Force report and resulting Equity Policy 9001 were considered in the development of the strategic plan. This Annual Equity Report aligns the equity policy with priorities established in the strategic plan and reports equity progress using the same benchmarks as those used in the strategic plan.
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Eboni Turner, a high school student from Chicago, will never forget the six weeks she spent in Madison for the Summer Science Institute.She was doing field research in Lake Wingra when she got stuck in the decomposing material at the bottom.
"It smells really, really bad," said Turner, who will be a senior this fall. "While I was scared, this was so cool. I was stuck in stuff and I had to get out."
Turner was one of 16 students who participated in the recent Summer Science Institute, a six-week residential program through the Center for Biology Education at UW-Madison.
The program gives high school students an understanding of biological and physical research while learning about college life. The students work in groups with mentors on a specific research project. Then they write a research report and present their project and findings at a symposium at the end of the program.
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School districts across Texas are paying tens of millions of taxpayer dollars for private tutoring that has a mixed track record of improving student test scores.
Even districts that want to stop footing the bill to ineffective providers are not allowed. The No Child Left Behind law guarantees free tutoring to low-income students who attend schools that repeatedly miss federal academic targets. Parents get to pick the tutoring provider from a state-approved list that has grown to more than 200 for-profit and nonprofit entities.
Since the law went into effect in 2002, Texas has never removed a provider from its list despite complaints from school districts and the state's own evaluation that found seven of the eight tutoring companies studied had no significant impact on student achievement.
With the latest federal school ratings released last week, districts are preparing to send letters to parents from about 140 under-performing schools about the tutoring options. At the same time, officials with some of the state's largest urban districts, including Houston, San Antonio and Fort Worth, are calling for tougher standards for the tutoring providers.
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Teacher Donald Hawkins shouts enthusiastically to his 3- and 4-year-old students: "Can you name any animals that hop?"The answers trickle in from the sleepy but smiling youngsters: a kangaroo, a frog, a rabbit. They decide to mimic the frog. It's 9:30ish in the morning inside Browne Education Campus's comfortably warm gymnasium in Northeast Washington. Fast-tempoed music gets the kids in the mood to hop, and off they go, rhythmically squatting and bouncing across the room. When the music stops, the children rise, a little more awake.
"Are you ready?" Hawkins yells. "I can't hear you!"
"Ready!" they reply.
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On a Tuesday morning in February, Soheila Ahmad's first-grade class at Imagine Southeast Public Charter School has just finished language arts. The 12 children -- all boys, all African American -- are tidying up their desks.There are no windows in this basement room, but one wall, the backdrop for posters, is painted sky blue.
"I need the cleanup crew here," shouts Ahmad, a 23-year-old first-time teacher, sweeping her arm around the central area of the class, where a few books lie scattered on the blue rug, and six blue beanbag chairs are arranged in a reading circle. Three boys hop to it, hoisting and heaving the beanbags into a pile against the far wall. A fourth boy collects the books and reshelves them. It is 10:30 a.m. and time for math.
"Let's practice counting by 10s to 100," Ahmad says.
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In the last year, advocacy groups have churned out reports on how all kinds of students--those who work, are minorities, attend less-selective colleges, or come from low-income families--struggle in higher education. They have talked about the needs of the modern work force, and how the United States is falling behind.All together, the groups' findings have been picked up by USA Today, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, and so
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Bob Herbert, via a kind reader:
The world leadership qualities of the United States, once so prevalent, are fading faster than the polar ice caps.We once set the standard for industrial might, for the advanced state of our physical infrastructure, and for the quality of our citizens' lives. All are experiencing significant decline.
The latest dismal news on the leadership front comes from the College Board, which tells us that the U.S., once the world's leader in the percentage of young people with college degrees, has fallen to 12th among 36 developed nations.
At a time when a college education is needed more than ever to establish and maintain a middle-class standard of living, America's young people are moving in exactly the wrong direction. A well-educated population also is crucially important if the U.S. is to succeed in an increasingly competitive global environment.
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Internet companies such as Facebook and Google have come in for repeated criticism in Germany, where the government has concerns about what they do with users' data. Now one state, worried about the amount of information young people reveal online, plans to teach school pupils how to keep a low profile on the web.Many of Facebook's 2 million users in Germany are young people who might not give a second thought to posting pictures of themselves and their friends skinny-dipping or passed out at parties. Unfortunately, being casual with one's data also has its risks. After all, potential employers also know how to use social networking tools.
Now the government of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, recognizing that young people are not always aware of the dangers of revealing personal information on the Internet, is planning to teach school students how to deal with the Internet and social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
"Our goal is to convey that the Internet doesn't only offer chances and opportunities, but also has risks that students should understand in order to exercise autonomy with regards to digital media," said North Rhine-Westphalia's media minister, Angelica Schwall-Düren, in an interview with the Thursday edition of the regional newspaper WAZ.
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Early on in Beverly L. Hall's 11-year tenure as superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools, she figured that the academic gains she intended to make with the city's mostly poor, black students would face skepticism."I knew the day would come when people would question, was the progress real?" she said in an interview last week.
So Dr. Hall took a risk, signing up for a trial program to track and compare urban school districts. Since then, Atlanta has made the highest gains in the program in reading and among the highest in math, making it a national model and Dr. Hall a star in the education field.
But that has not insulated her from a cheating scandal that initially threatened to engulf two-thirds of the district's 84 schools. Even after an independent investigation recently found that the problem was much less widespread, critics have called for her resignation and attacked the investigation's credibility.
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DeKalb County school board members insist they are not heading down the same path as Clayton County and will salvage the district's accreditation."I'm not concerned about us losing accreditation," board chairman Tom Bowen said Friday. "There will have to be a lot of back and forth with [the accrediting agency] and non-compliance on our part. I don't see that happening."
But many of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools' concerns about DeKalb mirror the questions the agency had about Clayton two years ago, which led to its losing accreditation.
On Friday, the DeKalb board announced that it received an extension to answer SACS questions about hiring practices, training, conflict of interest, nepotism, procurement policies, the superintendent search and other areas.
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I have been an educator and education advocate in Oakland, California for almost two decades, and I have spent those decades working towards the achievement of those four words. In California, an Academic Performance Index of 800 is the minimum score for a school to be considered good. In 1999, Oakland operated 42 "red" schools, schools with API scores of less than 500. 38 of those "red" schools sat firmly in what we call the "flatlands" of Oakland, the area occupied by predominantly low-income communities of color. At that time, there was only one charter public school, struggling as well. In 1999, Oakland Unified was widely considered one of the worst school districts in the country.In response to this crisis, families across the flatlands mobilized to demand reforms that supported small, autonomous, new schools and more rigorous curriculum in all schools. New and bold leadership responded to this call and brought school and principal accountability, greater autonomy over school budgets and programs, student-based budgeting, an options policy for ALL families, and a policy to close failing schools and replace them with new schools.
In 2010, the Oakland public school landscape has been dramatically altered. From 2003 to 2007, Oakland Unified closed 18 failing schools and replaced them with 26 new schools, most with carefully-selected staffs, new program designs, and greater autonomies. The district created a culture of accountability and performance, used data strategically, and focused on rigorous standards-aligned instruction. Oakland Unified has been the most improved urban school district in California for five consecutive years, and today, there are only 5 "red" schools.
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M.C. Escher was a Dutch graphic artist known for his mathematically inspired constructions that seem impossible. His artwork represents explorations of infinity, architecture, fractals, and tessellations. Gifted students find his work fascinating and love studying his prints, which are readily available in books and on the Internet. Young people also appreciate learning about the theories behind Escher's artwork and trying to replicate his techniques.
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The advice, leaked to The Sunday Telegraph, is the latest blow for Mr Gove as he battles against the fallout from his botched announcement last month in which he axed more than 700 projects.At least two local authorities - Sandwell and Nottingham City Council - are known to be preparing possible legal challenges, and several other councils may follow in moves which could see the taxpayer facing payouts totalling hundreds of millions of pounds.
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I asked the candidates about their views on the role of state government in K-12 public school districts, local control, the current legislature's vote to eliminate the consideration of economic conditions in school district/teacher union arbitration proceedings and their views on state tax & spending priorities.
Video Link, including iPhone, iPad and iPod users mp3 audio; Doug Zwank's website, financial disclosure filing; www search: Bing, Clusty, Google, Yahoo.
View a transcript here.
Video link, including iPhone, iPad and iPod users, mp3 audio Brett Hulsey's website, financial disclosure filing; www search: Bing, Clusty, Google, Yahoo
Thanks to Ed Blume for arranging these interviews and the candidates for making the time to share their views. We will post more candidate interviews as they become available. More information on the September 14, 2010 primary election can be found here.
Candidate financial disclosures.
View a transcript here.
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With an additional $30,000,000 to come to Marc Tucker's NCEE from the USED's "competition" for assessment consortia grants, his hare-brained scheme for enticing high school sophomores or juniors deemed "college-ready" by the results of the Cambridge University-adapted "Board" exams that he plans to pilot in 10 states (including Massachusetts now) comes closer to reality. The problems are not only with this scheme (and the exams NCEE will use to determine "college-readiness") but also with the coursework NCEE's America's Choice is busy preparing to sell to our high schools to prepare students for these "Board" exams. (Try to find some good examples of the reading and math items and figure out their academic level.)
First, some background. NCEE's scheme was originally financed by a $1,500,000 pilot grant from the Gates Foundation. It will now benefit from a sweetheart deal of $30,000,000–all taxpayers' money. Having Gates pay for both NCEE's start-up and the development of Common Core standards certainly helped America's Choice to put its key people on Common Core's ELA and mathematics standards development and draft-writing committees to ensure that they came up with the readiness standards Gates had paid for and wanted NCEE to use. NCEE has a completely free hand to "align" its "Board" exams exactly how it pleases with Common Core's "college-readiness" level and to set passing scores exactly where it wants, since the passing score must be consistent across piloting states.
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The children crouched like bushes rooted in the church's sanctuary and waited for the music.Then they rose alongside their instructors, lifted their arms and sang Labi Siffre's 1980s anti-apartheid anthem as it boomed through the stereo system:
"The higher you build your barriers, the taller I become
The farther you take my rights away, the faster I will run..."
It's the last week of Wisconsin's only Freedom School, but the morning group exercise of singing, clapping, stomping, hugging and chanting is the same as it's been every day for the past several weeks at All Peoples Church, 2600 N. 2nd St. It's also the same way Freedom School has begun this summer at 145 other sites around the country.
Administered nationally by the Children's Defense Fund nonprofit advocacy group in Washington, D.C., Freedom Schools aim to teach kids from first grade through high school to fall in love with reading. The six-week summer program is rooted in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, so reading is seen more broadly as a way to empower low-income and minority youth, to instill them with the education, confidence and tolerance necessary to succeed and help others.
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Since it was published last year, The Spirit Level - Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson's book on why equal societies do better than unequal ones - has become a sparkplug for heated, testy debate. Not one, not two, but three pamphlet-length critiques of it have been published, while others have rushed to man the book's intellectual barricades ('This book's inconvenient truths must be faced', said a Guardian editorial).Yet now Pickett and Wilkinson have imposed an extraordinary condition on future debate about their book. Because much of the criticism of The Spirit Level has consisted of 'unsubstantiated claims made for political purposes' (in their view), 'all future debate should take place in peer-reviewed journals', they decree.
Wow. In one fell swoop they have painted any criticism of their book that appears in non-peer-reviewed journals as somehow illegitimate. They snootily say that 'none of [the] critiques are peer-reviewed' and announce that from now on they'll only engage in discussions that 'take place in peer-reviewed journals'. So any peep of a critique that appears in a newspaper, a book published by a publishing house that doesn't do peer review, a non-academic magazine, an online magazine, a blog or a radio show - never mind those criticisms aired in sweaty seminar rooms, bars or on park benches - is unworthy because it hasn't been stamped with that modern-day mark of decency, that indicator of seriousness, that licence which proves you're a Person Worth Listening To: the two magic words 'Peer Reviewed.'
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Over the years, I feel like I've come to know you -- your political leanings and life experiences, your writing style, sense of humor and average snark level. But what about your math skills?For example: Can you (or any high school student you know) do this?
Show that there are only finitely many triples (x, y, z) of positive integers satisfying the equation abc = 2009(a + b + c).
Or this?Let n be an integer greater than 3. Points V1, V2, ..., Vn, with no three collinear, lie on a plane. Some of the segments ViVj , with 1 *< i < j < n, are constructed. Points Vi and Vj are neighbors if ViVj is constructed. Initially, chess pieces C1,C2, ...,Cn are placed at points V1, V2, ..., Vn (not necessarily in that order) with exactly one piece at each point. In a move, one can choose some of the n chess pieces, and simultaneously relocate each of the chosen piece from its current position to one of its neighboring positions such that after the move, exactly one chess piece is at each point and no two chess pieces have exchanged their positions. A set of constructed segments is called harmonic if for any initial positions of the chess pieces, each chess piece Ci(1< i < n) is at the point Vi after a finite number of moves. Determine the minimum number of segments in a harmonic set.
(*Note: This sign (<) should read "less than or equal to," but I have some keyboard limitations.)
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Having spent September 2009-June 2010 serving as a Fulbright Scholar in General Education in Hong Kong , I have now returned to my responsibilities at the University of Washington, Bothell, as a Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and the Director of the academic side of our First Year Experience. All the universities in Hong Kong are moving from three to four year degrees and UW Bothell started first and second year programs in 2006 and is now rapidly expanding its degree options. On both sides of the Pacific, curricular and administrative structural reform are moving forward at a sometimes dizzying, but always invigorating, pace. What are the connections and asymmetries involved in such an effort?As in other parts of the world, a very similar language is emerging in both Seattle and Hong Kong around curricular reform, including the familiar rhetoric of student-centeredness; outcomes-based assessment; interdisciplinarity; writing, quantitative, and IT literacies; cross-cultural competencies; interactive pedagogies; and the development of new administrative structures that can serve the university as a whole instead of reproducing only department or College level concerns.
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A recent and startling increase in tick-borne Lyme disease among Islesboro residents gave nine students in Islesboro Central School's ninth grade, and two of their teachers, science teacher Heather Sinclair and business and computer education teacher Vicki Conover, a unique and perfect opportunity to combine classroom and experiential learning. To examine the connection between the island's deer population and the increase of Lyme disease, students in Ms. Sinclair's biology class conducted primary scientific research to determine the island's deer herd size, then with Ms. Conover's guidance used GIS and computer applications to analyze and present the data to propose one possible cause of the disease's increase.As a Health Center Advisory Board (HCAB) member, Ms. Sinclair heard concerns about the deer herd's possible relationship to the spread of Lyme disease on island. The HCAB decided to conduct a deer count and hired a consulting firm, Stantec, to design a survey. The students and twenty community volunteers did the on-the-ground research, following the procedure recommended by Stantec. To establish a sample, Stantec identified thirty-three random transects, lines across the island, that included representative terrain and habitat. The students and Stantec both analyzed the data that volunteers gathered.
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Traditional elite schools continued their dominance of the fifth-form public exam to the last, with their pupils filling most of the top-scoring slots.In the last Hong Kong Certificate of Education Examination (HKCEE), 16 pupils scored 10 distinctions, compared to 13 last year, results released yesterday show.
St Joseph's College did best, with four straight-A stars. Diocesan Girls' School and Queen's College each produced three top scorers, La Salle College two and three other elite schools - St Paul's Co-educational College, King's College and Kwun Tong Maryknoll College - one each.
The only one among the 16 from a New Territories school has a special distinction - she racked up her perfect result despite suffering from a rare blood disease that requires frequent medial check-ups and occasional spells in hospital.
"I feel pain in the stomach and vomit when I am under pressure," said Yiu Sze-wan, 17 - only the second straight-A pupil in the history of the SKH Lam Woo Memorial Secondary School in Kwai Hing.
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Seattle Public Schools wants teacher evaluations and student performance joined at the hip, but the teachers' union is taking issue with how the district plans to fuse those two factors.I was impressed with Susan Troller's recent article on Teacher Accountability and the Madison School District, particularly her inquiry to Lisa Wachtel:A proposal that would tie teacher evaluations to student growth prompted a 2,000-word refutation e-mail from the Seattle Education Association earlier this week, a sign of friction in ongoing contract negotiations.
"Their mechanized system is one of minimal rewards and automated punishments," union leaders wrote to members Wednesday.
That statement was sent in response to an e-mail teachers received this week from public schools Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson. She detailed how the school plans to roll out parts of its bargaining proposal -- specifically factors related to how teachers' performances are evaluated.
The district is proposing an four-tier evaluation system that would roll out over two years. Teachers who chose to be evaluated base on to "student growth outcomes and peer and student feedback" would be eligible for perks, including an immediate 1 percent pay increase, eligibility for stipends and other forms of "targeted support."
The district's recent decision to provide professional development time for middle and high school teachers through an early release time for students on Wednesdays is part of this focus, according to Wachtel. The district has sponsored an early release time for elementary school teachers since 1976.This is certainly not the only example of such spending initiatives. Jeff Henriques has thoughtfully posted a number of very useful articles over the years, including: Where does MMSD get its numbers from? and District SLC Grant - Examining the Data From Earlier Grants, pt. 3. It appears that these spending items simply reflect growing adult to adult programs within the K-12 world, or a way to channel more funds into the system.She admits there isn't any data yet to prove whether coaching is a good use of resources when it comes to improving student achievement.
"Anecdotally we're hearing good things from a number of our schools, but it's still pretty early to see many specific changes," she says. "It takes consistency, and practice, to change the way you teach. It's not easy for anyone; I think it has to be an ongoing effort."
I believe it is inevitable that we will see more "teacher evaluation" programs. What they actually do and whether they are used is of course, another question.
Ideally, every school's website should include a teacher's profile page, with their CV, blog and social network links, course syllabus and curriculum notes. Active use of a student information system such as PowerSchool, or Infinite Campus, among others, including all assignments, feedback, periodic communication, syllabus, tests and notes would further provide useful information to parents and students.
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It may sound reasonable enough.Madison schools plan to give middle and high school teachers an hour of "professional collaboration time" on Wednesday afternoons starting this fall. The goal is to let teachers meet in groups to share ideas and improve their instruction.
We're all for boosting performance and results.
But the logistics of this new policy, announced just weeks before the start of school, are troubling.
For starters, Madison elementary schools already release their students early on Mondays to give teachers time to collaborate. That means a lot of parents will now have to juggle two early release days rather than one.
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The district's recent decision to provide professional development time for middle and high school teachers through an early release time for students on Wednesdays is part of this focus, according to Wachtel. The district has sponsored an early release time for elementary school teachers since 1976.Susan did a nice job digging into the many issues around the "education reform" movement, as it were. Related topics: adult to adult spending and Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman's recent speech on the adult employment emphasis of school districts.She admits there isn't any data yet to prove whether coaching is a good use of resources when it comes to improving student achievement.
"Anecdotally we're hearing good things from a number of our schools, but it's still pretty early to see many specific changes," she says. "It takes consistency, and practice, to change the way you teach. It's not easy for anyone; I think it has to be an ongoing effort."
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Progress seen over several decades in narrowing the educational achievement gap between black and white students has remained stalled for 20 years, according to data analyzed in a new report.
Called "The Black-White Achievement Gap: When Progress Stopped," the report by the Educational Testing Service examines periods of progress and stagnation since 1910 in closing the achievement gap.
Anybody who thinks that the achievement gap will be closed by throwing more standardized test scores at kids and without addressing health and social issues should read the report and think again.
The report, written by Paul E. Barton and Richard J. Coley of ETS's Policy Information Center, uses data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress to show that there was a steady narrowing of the achievement gap from the 1970s until the late 1980s. Scores essentially remained the same since then.
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It's another sign of private money shaking up public education in the District: A $5.5 million gift will dramatically help expand a network of high-performing charter schools in the city, with a goal of more than doubling the number of students enrolled by 2015.The grant by Venture Philanthropy Partners, a nonprofit organization using the principles of venture-capital investment to help children from low-income families in the Washington region, will fund Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) schools. The grant is to be announced Monday.
"VPP recognized our ability to impact not just the students we have, but the students throughout D.C.," said Allison Fansler, president and chief operating officer of KIPP DC. "We want to set a high bar for what's possible."
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For many years, critics of the SAT have cited a verbal question involving the word "regatta" as an example of how the test may favor wealthier test-takers, who also are more likely to be white. It's been a long time since the regatta question was used -- and the College Board now has in place a detailed process for testing all questions and potential questions, designed to weed out questions that may favor one group of students over another.But a major new research project -- led by a scholar who favors standardized testing -- has just concluded that the methods used by the College Board (and just about every other testing entity for either admissions or employment testing) are seriously flawed. While the new research doesn't conclude that the tests are biased, it says that they could be -- and that the existing methods of detection wouldn't reveal that.
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There appears to be a lot of support, right now, among politicians, the media, and rest of the "opinion-making" class, for Education Reform.I understand that. The Education Reform movement has a lot of very attractive bumper-sticker type slogans that appear to make a lot of very good sense. Who wouldn't be in favor of firing bad teachers? We've all had a bad teacher who should be fired - haven't we? Even if you haven't had a bad teacher, you've heard the horror stories about them. Who doesn't think accountability is a good thing? Who wouldn't support innovation and choice? It all sounds really good and worthy of our support. Morover, anyone who opposes it, such as teachers' unions, must be doing so for their own selfish purposes.
It's only when people go past the bumper-stick slogans, get past the anectdotes and myths, and begin to consider the realities that the elements of this vaunted Education Reform start to break down.
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Professor Andrew Hacker says that higher education in the U.S. is broken.He argues that too many undergraduate courses are taught by graduate assistants or professors who have no interest in teaching.
Hacker proposes numerous changes, including an end to the tenure system, in his book, Higher Education?
"Tenure is lifetime employment security, in fact, into the grave" Hacker tells NPR's Tony Cox. The problem, as he sees it, is that the system "works havoc on young people," who must be incredibly cautious throughout their years in school as graduate students and young professors, "if they hope to get that gold ring."
That's too high a cost, Hacker and his co-author, Claudia Dreifus, conclude. "Regretfully," Hacker says, "tenure is more of a liability than an asset."
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Reading the blog of the mildly mysterious G.F. Brandenburg, I gathered a clue to why the reports there are so easy to read for geezers like me who squint a lot at computer screens. Brandenburg reveals in passing that he retired as a D.C. teacher recently, so he is likely not too far from my age cohort, and understands us deeply.Bless him, and not just for the amazing clarity of his written words. He is savage toward D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee, whom I highly regard. But there is no substitute for his analysis of what is happening with D.C. achievement scores, and the ways they are being used for various political purposes.
Here is his deft analysis of what has happened to elementary scores, which have gone up, and then down, in the Rhee era:
Contrary to the spin put on things by [D.C. Mayor Adrian] Fenty and Rhee, at the elementary level, virtually all of the increases on DC-CAS scores over the past 4 years happened during the period '07 to '08. And it so happens that 2006 was the first year that DCPS switched to using the DC-CAS as its major standardized test, instead of using the Stanford-9 (also known as the SAT-9). That was under superintendent Janey.
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A year or two ago, I received this e-mail. The writer was upset with me for arguing that school principals should have the power to fire teachers who do not perform. As numerous educators have told me, union protections being what they are, dumping a teacher -- even a bad one -- is an almost impossible task.My correspondent, a teacher, took issue with my desire to see that changed, noting that without thos
